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tie

THE
BOOK OF MASKS

BY REMY DE GOURMONT

Translated by
Jack Lewis

Introduction by
LUDWIG Levvisohn

JOHN W. LUCE AND COMPANY
BOSTON MCMXXI

CONTENTS

iNTRODtTCnON I

Authors Preface Cj^

•^SMaeteriinck .•.,.... 21

■^^Verhaeren 35

-De RiGNiSR 43

Vi£l£-Griffin 51

-Mallarm4 (SS^

^Samain 69

quillard 73

Herold 79

Rett£ . • • • 85

De L'Isle-Adah 91

Tailhad^ ^ lOI

Renard 109

DUMUR 117

Eekhoud 125

Abam .•••••••• 135

LAUTRiAMONT I4I

CORBltRE 153

Rimbaud i6i

PoiCTEViN 167

CONTENTS

GiDE . 175

LouYS 183

Rachilde 189

HiTYSMANS 195

* Laporgue 205

Mor£as 213

MeRIULL 221

Saint-Pol-Roux ' 229

De MONTESQUIOU 235

Kahn • • 243

'^^Verlaine 251

TRANSLAnoNS FROM XHE Text . • • . 254

INTRODUCTION

TO take critical questions seriously, even pas-
sionately, is one of the marks of a genuinely
civilized society. It points to both personal dis-
interestedness and to an imaginative absorption
in fundamentals. The American who watches
eagerly some tilt in that great critical battle which
has gone on for ages and has now reached our
shores, is released from his slavery to the inmie-
diate and the parochial; he has ceased to flinch at
the free exercise of thought; he has begun to exam-
ine his mind as his fathers examined only their
conscience; he is a little less concerned for speed
and a little more for direction; he is almost a philos-
opher and has risen from mere heated gregarious-
ness to voluntary co-operation in a ^iritual order.
His equipment is, as a rule, still meagre, and so
his partisanship is not always an instructed one.
He may be overwhelmed by the formidable phil-
osophical apparatus of one critic or merely irritated
by the political whims of another. Hence nothing
could well be more helpful to him than an intro-
duction to a foreign critic who is at once a stringent
thinker and a charming writer, who permitted his
msight to be obscured by neither moral nor polit-

INTRODUCTION

ical prejudices, who is both urbane and incisive,
catholic and discriminating.

Remy de Gourmont, like all the very great
critics — Goethe, Ste. Beuve, Hazlitt, Jules
Lemaitre — knew the creative instinct and exer-
cised the creative faculty. Hence he understood,
what the mere academician, the mere scholar, can
never grasp, that literature is life grown flame-
like and articulate; that, therefore, like life itself,
it varies in aim and character, in form and color
and savor and is the memorable record of and
commentary upon each stage in that great process
of change that we call the world. To write like
the Greeks or the Elizabethans or the French
classics is precisely what we must not do. It
would be both presimiptuous and futile. All that
we have to contribute to mankind, what is it but
just — our selves? If we were duplicates of our
greatgrandfathers we would be littering the narrow
earth to no enriching purpose; all we have to con-
tribute to literature is, again, our selves. This
^moment, this sensation, this pang, this thought —
this little that is intimately our own is all we have
of the imique and precious and incomparable.
Let us express it beautifully, individually, mem-
orably and it is all we can do; it is all that the
classics did in their day. To imitate the classics
— be one! That is to say, live widely, intensely,
imsparingly and record your experience in some

INTRODUCTION

timeless form. This, in brief, is the critical tiieory
of Gounnont, this is the background of that start-
ling and yet, unon reflection, so dear and necessary
saying of hisQ|The only excuse a man has for
writing is thathe^express himself, that he reveal
to others the kind of world reflected in the mirwjr
of his soul; his only excuse is that he be originall!^

Gourmont, like the Symbolists whom he de-'^'X
scribes in this volume, founded his theory of the
arts upon a metaphysical speculation. He learned"^
from the German idealists, primarily the Post- i
Kantians and Schopenhauer, that the world is
only our.ri^presentation^^ojJy ourincUvidual vision
and that, since there is no criterion of the exis-
tence or the character of an exl^maLl ireality, that
vision is, of course, aH we actually have to express
in art. But to accept his critical theory it is not
necessary to accept his metaphysical views. The
variety of human experience remains equally in-
finite and equally fascinating on account of its
very infiniteness, whatever its objective content
may or may not be. We can dismiss that ante-
cedent and insoluble question and stiU agree that
the best thing a man can give in art as in life is
Ms own self. What kind of a self? One hears at
once the hot and angry question of the conserva-
tive critic. A disciplined one, by all means, an
infinitely and subtiy cultivated one. But not one

sbape4 after some given pattern, not a replica, not

•••

INTRODUCTION

a herd-animal, but a human personality. But
achieving such personalities, the reply comes,
people fall into error. Well, this is an imperfect
universe and the world-spirit, as Goethe said, is
more tolerant than people think.

It is clear that criticism conceived of in this
fashion, can do little with the old methods of harsh
valuing and stiff classification. If, as Jules,
Lemaitre put it, a poem, a play, a novel, "exists"
at all, if it has that fundamental veracity of expe-
rience and energy of expression which raise it to
the level of literary discussion, a critic like Gour-
mont cannot and will not pass a classifying judg-
ment on it at all. For such judgments involve
the assumption that there exists a fixed scale of
objective values. And for such a scale we search
both the world and the mind in vain. Hence, too
— and this is a point of the last importance — we
are done with arbitrary exclusions, exclusions by
transitory conventions or by tribal habits lifted to
the plane of eternal laws. All experience, the
whole soul of man — nothing less than that is now
our province. And no one has done more to bring
us that critical and creative freedom and enlarge-
ment of scope than Remy de Gourmont.

In the volume before us, for instance, he dis-
cusses writers of very varied moods and interests.
Dr. Samuel Johnson or, for that matter, a modern
preceptist critic, speaking of these very poets,

*j?i.T.^jr*.a . - .-"r^ ~^ ' '..■."■ ' _ - -_ .~^^'r

■ Mill yf II . ■ ^irr - A_ - I -I B J^^ * I "• I I U IM M O

INTRODUCTION

would have told us how some of them were noble
and some ignoble and certain ones moral and others
no better than they should be. And both of these
good and learned and arrogant men woisld have
instructed Verlaine in what to conceal, and Gustave
Kahn in how to build verses and Regnier in how
to enlarge the range of his imagery. Thus they
would have missed the special beauty and thrill
that each of these poets has brought into the
world. For they read — as all their kind reads —
not with peace in their hearts but with a bludgeon
in their hands. But if we watch Gourmont who
had, by the way, an intellect of matchless energy,
we find that he read his poets with that wise pas-
siveness which Wordsworth wanted men to cul-
tivate before the stars and hills. He is uniformly
sensitive; he lets his poets play upon him; he is
the lute upon which their spirits breathe. And
then that lute itself begins to sound and to utter a
music of its own which swells and interprets and
clarifies the music of his poets and brings nearer
to us the wisdom and the loveliness which they
and he have brought into the world.

Thus it is, first of all, as one of the earliest and
finest examples of the New Criticism that this
English version of the "Book of Masks" is to be
welcomed. For the New Criticism is the chief
phenomenon in that movement toward spiritual
and moral tolerance which the world so sorely

INTRODUCTION

needs. But the book is also to be welcomed and

valued for the sake of its specific subject matter.

One movement in the entire range of modem

poetry and only one surpasses the movement of

the French Symbolists in deamess of beauty,

lepth of feeling, wealth and variety of music.

This Symbolist movement arose in France as a

I protest against the naturalistic, the objective in

I substance and against the rigid and sonorous in

I form. Eloquence had so long, even during the

romantic period, dominated French poetry that

profound inwardness of inspiration and lyrical

fluidity of expression were regarded as essential by

the literary reformers of the later eighteen himdred

and eighties. It was in the service of these ends

that Stephane Mallarm6 taught the Symbolist

system of poetics: tn naT ^^fi pn tlimp M i ., . #w» ^» n g

symbols of imseen realities, to use the extern al
world merely as a mi^^UQts of CQmmumcating^.mood
and revery and reflection. The doctrine and the
Verse of Mallarm6 spoke to a Europe that was
imder the sway of a similar reaction and the work
of poets as diverse as Arthur Symons, William
Butler Yeats and Hugo von Hofmannsthal is un-
thinkable without the pervasive influence of the
French master. Mallarm4 and his doctrine sue,/
indeed, the starting point of all modern lyripid
poetry. Whatever has been written since, in iree
verse or fixed, betrays through conformity or re-

i — vi

INTRODUCTION

action, the mark of that doctrine and the restiltant
movement.

The actual poets of the movement are little
known among us. Verlaine's name is already
almost a classical one and the exquisite versions
of many of his poems by Arthur Symons are ac-
cessible; Verhaeren was lifted into a brief notoriety
some years ago. But who really reads the stormy
and passionate verses of the Flemish master? Nor
are there many who have entered the suave and
golden glow that radiates from Regnier, chief of
the living poets of France, or who have vibrated
to the melancholy of Samain or the inner music of
Francis Viel4-Grifl5n. The other poets, less co-
pious and less applauded, are not greatly inferior
in the quality of their best work. There is not a
poet in Grourmont's book who has not written some
vprses thatadd permanently to the world's store of
living beauty. Nor is it true that a slightly more
recent development in French poetry has sur-
passed the works of the Symbolists. M. Francis
Jammes writes with a charming simpUdty and M.
Paul Fort with a large rhythmic line, with fresh-
ness and with grace and the very yoimg "un-
animiste" poets are intellectual and tolerant and
sane. But they are all, in the essentials of poetry,
children of the Symbolists whose work remains
the great modem contribution of France to poetical
literature. Ludwig Lewisohn.

FREFACE

IT IS difficult to characterize a literary
evolution in the hour when the fruits are
still uncertain and the very blossoming
in the orchard unconsummated . Precocious
trees, slow-developing and dubious trees
whidi one would not care, however, to call
sterile: the orchard is very diverse and rich,
too rich. The thickness of the leaves brings
shadow, and the shadow discolors the flowers
and dulls the hues of the fruit.

We will stroll through this rich, dark
orchard and sit down for a moment at the
foot of the strongest, fairest, and most
agreeable trees.

Literary evolutions receive a name when
they merit it by importance, necessity and
fitness. Quite often, this name has no pre-
cise meaning, but is useful in serving as a
rallying sign to all who accept it, and as the
aiming point for those who attack it. Thus
the battle is fought around a purely verbal

PREFACE

labarum. What is the meaning of Roman-
ticism? It is easier to feel than to explain
it. What is the meaning of Symbolism?
Practically nothing, if we adhere to the
narrow etymological sense. If we pass
/beyond, it may mean individualism in liter-
^ ature, liberty in art, abandonment of taught
formulas, tendencies towards the new and
strange, or even towards the bizarre. It
may also mean idealism, a contempt for the
social anecdote, anti-naturalism, a propen-
sity to seize only the characteristic details
of life, to emphasize only those acts that
distinguish one man from another, to strive
to achieve essentials; finally, for the poets
symbolism seems allied to free verse, that
• is, to unswathed verse whose young body
may frolic at ease, liberated from embarr-
assments of swaddling clothes and straps.

But all this has little affinity with the
syllables of the word, for we must not let it
be insinuated that symbolism is only the
transformation of the old allegory or of the
art of personifying an idea in a human
being, a landscape, or a narrative. Such

PREFACE

an art is the whole of art, art primordial and
eternal, and a literature freed from this
necessity would be unmentionable. It
would be null, with as much aesthetic sig-
nificance as the clucking of the hocco or the
braying of the wild ass.

Literature, indeed, is nothing nKM"e than
the artistic development of* the idea, the
symbolization of the idea by me^jwr^of
imaginary heroes. Heroes, or men (for
every man in his sphere is a hero), are only
sketched by life; it is art which perfects
them by giving them, in exchange for their
poor sick souls, the treasure of an immortal
idea, and the humblest, if chosen by a great
poet, may be called to this participation.
Who so humble as that Aeneas whom Virgil
burdens with all the weight of being the
idea of Roman force, and who so humble as
that Don Quixote on whom Cervantes
imposes the tremendous load of being at
once Roland, the four sons Aymon, Amadis,
Palmerin, Tristan and all the knights of the
Round Table! The history of symbolism
would be the history of man himself, since

PREFACE

man can only assimilate a symbolized idea.
Needless to insist on this, for one might
think that the young devotees of symbolism
are unaware of the Vita Nuava and the
character Beatrice, whose frail, pure shoul-
ders nevertheless keep erect under the com-
plex weight of symbols with which the poet
overwhelms her.

Whence, then, came the illusion that
symbolizing of the idea was a novelty?

In these last years, we had a very serious
attempt of literature based on a scorn of
the idea, a disdain of the symbol. We are
acquainted with its theory, which seems
culinary: take a slice of life, etc. Zola,
having invented the recipe, forgot to serve
it. His "slices of life" are heavy poems of
a miry, tumultuous lyricism, popular ro-
manticism, democratic symbolism, but ever
full of an idea, always pregnant with
allegoric meaning. The idealistic revolt,
then, did not rear itself against the works
(unless against the despicable works) of
naturalism, but against its theory, or rather
against its pretension; returning to the

PREFACE

eternal, antecedent necessities of art, the
rebels presumed to express new and even
surprising truths in professing their wish to
reinstate the idea in literature; they only
relighted the torch; they also lighted, all
around, many small candles,
,;.There is, nevertheless, a new truth, which
has recently entered literature and art, a
truth quite metaphysical and quite a priori
(in appearance), quite young, since it is
only a century old, and truly new, since it
has not yet served in the aesthetic order.
This evangelical and marvelous truth, lib- .
erating and renovating, is the principle o^
the world's ideality. With reference to that
thinking subject, man, the world, everything
that is external, only exists according to the
idea he forms of it We only know phe-
nomena, we only reason from appearances;
all truth in itself escapes us; the essence is
unassailable. It is what Schopenhauer has
popularized under this so simple and clear
formula: the world is my representation.
I do not see that which is; that which is, is
what I see. As many thinking men, so

PREFACE

many diverse and perhaps dissimilar worlds.
This doctrine, which Kant left on the way
to be flung to the rescue of the castaway
morality, is so fine and supple that one
transposes it from theory to practice with-
out clashing with logic, even the most
exigent. It is a universal principle of
emancipation for every man capable of
understanding. It has only revolutionized
aesthetics, but here it is a question only of
aesthetics.

Definitions of the beautiful are still given
in manuals; they go farther; formulas are
given by which artists attain the expression
of the beautiful. There are institutes for
teaching these formulas, which are but the
average and epitome of ideas or of preceding
appreciations. Theories in aesthetics gen-
erally being obscure, the ideal paragon, the
model, is joined to them. In those insti-
tutes (and the civilized world is but a vast
Institute) all novelty is held blasphemous,
all personal affirmation becomes an act of
madness. Nordau, who has read, with
bizarre patience, all contemporary litera-

PREFACE

ture, propagated this idea, basely destructive '
of all individualism, that '^nonconformity" is
the capital crime of a writer. We violently
differ in opinion. A writer's capital crima
is conformity, imitativeness, submissionn
to rules and precepts. A writer's work*^
should be not only the reflection, but
the magnified reflection o( his person-
ality. /The only excuse a man has for
writing, is to express himself, to reveal
to others the world reflected in his individual
mirror; his only excuse is to be origin^^i)
He should say things not yet said, and say
them in a form not yet formulated. He
should create his own aesthetics, and we
should admit as many aesthetics as there
are original minds, judging them acording
to what they are not.

Let us then admit that symbolism, though
excessive, unseasonable and pretentious, ,je
the expression of individualism in art. ^

This too simple but clear definition will
suffice provisionally. In the course of the
following portraits, or later, we doubtless
will have occasion to complete it. Its prin-
ts

PREFACE

dple will, nevertheless, serve to guide us, by
inciting us to investigate, not what the new
writers should have done, according to
monstrous rules and tyrannical traditions,
but what they wished to do. Aesthetics has
also become a personal talent; no one has
the right to impose it upon ' others. An
artist can be compared with himself alone,
but there is profit and justice in noting
dissimilarities. We will try to mark, not
how the **newcomers" resemble each other,
but how they differ, that is to say in what
way they exist, for to exist is to be different.

This is not written to pretend that among
most of them are no evident similarities of
thought and technique, an . inevitable fact,
but so inevitable that it is without interest.
No more do we insinuate that this flowering
is spontaneous; before the flower comes the
seed, itself fallen from a flower. These
young people have fathers and masters:
Baudelaire, Villiers de ITsle-Adam, Verlaine,
Mallarme, and others. They love them
dead or alive, they read them, they listen
to them. What stupidity to think that we

PREFACE

disdain those of yesterday! Who then has
a more admired and affectionate court than
Stephane Mallarme? And is Villiers for-
gotten? And Verlaine forsaken?

Now, we must warn that the order of these
portraits, without being altogether arbi-
trary, impUes no classification of prize-lists.
There are, even, outside of the gallery,
absent persohages, whom we will bring back
on occasion. There are empty frames and
also bare places. As for the portraits them-
selves, if any one judges them incomplete
and too brief, we reply that we wished them
so, having the intention only to give
indications, only to show, with the gesture
of an arm, the way.

Lastly, to join today with yesterday, we
have intercallated familiar faces among the
new figures: and then, instead of rewriting
a physiognomy known to many, we have
tried to bring to light some obscure point,
rather than the whole.

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

MMMS^

Mi^l^ ..^ ...

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

OF the life lived by sad beings who stir
in the mystery of a night. They
know nothing save to smile, to
sufiFer, to love; when they wish to under-
stand, the effort of their disquietude grows
to anguish, their revolt vanishes in sobbings.
To mount, forever to mount the mournful
steps of Calvary and beat the brow against
an iron door: so mounts Sister Ygraine, so
mounts and beats against the cruel iron gate
each of the poor creatures whose simple and
pure tragedies Maeterlinck reveals to us.

In other times the meaning of life was
known; then men were not ignorant of the
essential; since they knew the end of their
journey, and in what last inn they would
find the bed of repose. When, by science
itself, this elementary science had been
taken from them, some rejoiced, believing
themselves delivered of a burden; others
grieved, feeling clearly that above all the

^w.

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

other burdens on their shoulders, one had
been thrown, itself heavier than all the rest:
the burden of Doubt.

A whole literature has been begotten of
this sensation, a literature of grief, revolt
against the burden, blasphemies against the
mute God. But, after the fury of their
cries and interrogations, there was a re-
mission, and this was the literature of sad-
ness, uneasiness and anguish; revolt has
been declared useless and imprecation
puerile. Made wise by vain struggles,
humanity slowly resigns itself to knowing
nothing, comprehending nothing, fearing
nothing, hoping for nothing — except the
very remote.

There is an island somewhere in the mists,
and in the island is a ch&teau, and in the
ch&teau is a great room lit by a little lamp,
and in the great room peoi^e are waiting.
What do they await? They know not.
They are expecting someone to knock at
the door, they expect the lamp to go out,
they expect Death. They converse; yes,
they speak words which for an instant

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

trouble the silence. Then they listen again, '

leaving their phrases unended and their
gestures interrupted. They listen, they
wait. She will perhaps not come? Oh!
she will come. She always comes. It is
late, she will perhaps not come till the
morrow. And the people gathered in the
great room beneath the little lamp begin to
laugh and go on hoping. Someone knocks.
And that is all; it is a whole life; it is the
whole of life.

In this sense, Maeterlinck's dramas, so
deliciously unreal, are deeply alive and true;
his characters, with the appearance of phan-
toms, are steeped with life, like those
seemingly inert balls, which, when charged
with electricity, grow fulgent at the contact
of a point; they are not abstractions but
syntheses; they are states of soul or, better
still, states of humanity, moments, minutes
which shall be eternal. In short, they are
real, by dint of their unreality.

A like kind of art was formerly practiced,
after the Roman de la RosCy by the pious
romancers who, in little books of pretentious

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

clumsiness, made symbols and abstractions
revolve. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Le
Voyage Spirituel, by the Spaniard Palafox,
le Palais de V Amour divin, by an unknown
person, are not altogether contemptible
works, but things there are truly too explicit
and the characters bear names that are
truly too evident. Does one, in any free
theater, see a drama played by beings called
Courage, Hate, Joy, Silence, Care, Longing,
Fear, Anger, and Shame? The hour of such
amusement has passed or has not returned :
do not re-read le Palais de V Amour divin;
read la Mort de TintagUes, for it is of the
new work that we must ask for these aes-
thetic pleasures, if we desire them complete,
poignant and enveloping. Maeterlinck,
truly, takes, pierces and entwines us in
Octupi formed of the delicate hair of yoimg
sleeping princesses, and in the midst of them
the troubled sleep of the little child, "sad
as a young king". He entwines and bears
us where he pleases, to the very depths of
the abyss where whirls "the decomposed
corpse of Alladin's lamb", and farther, to

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

the pure dark regions where lovers say:
"Kiss me gravely. Close not the eyes
when I kiss you so. I want to see the kisses
that tremble in your heart; and the dew
that mounts from your soul . . . We shall
not find more kisses like these . • • — Ever-
more, evermore! . . . — No, no: one does
not Idss twice on the heart of death."
Before such delicate sighings, all objection
grows mute; one is silent at having felt a
new way of loving and expressing love.
New, truly. Maeterlinck is very much
himself, and to remain entirely personal he
can be a monochord; but he has sown,
steeped and scutched the hemp for this one
cord, and it sings gently, sadly, uniquely
under his drooping hands. He has achieved
a true work; he has found an unheard
muffled cry, a kind of lamentation, coldly
mystical. /

The word mysticism during these last
years has taken such diverse and even
divergent meanings that it must be clearly
and newly defined each time one writes it.
Certain persons give it a significance which

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

would draw it to that other word which
seems clear, individualism. It is certain
that it touches the other, since mysticism
may be called the state in which a soul,
abandoning the physical world and scornful
of its shocks and accidents, gives its mind
only to relations and direct intimacies with
the infinite. But, if the infinite is changeless
and one, souls are changing and many. A
N§oul has not the same commimications with
God as has his sister, and God, though
changeless and one, is modified by the desire
of each of his creatures and does not tell one
what he has told another. Liberty is the
privilege of the soul raised to mysticism.
The body itself is but a neighbor to whom
the soul scarcely gives the friendly counsel
of silence, but if the body speaks, she hears
it only as through a wall, and if the body acts,
she sees it act through a mask. Another
name has been historically given to such a
state of life: quietism. This sentence of
Maeterlinck is altogether that of a quietist
who shows us God smiling ''at out most
serious faults as one smiles at the play of
26

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

little dogs on a rug". This is serious but
true if we think how tiny a thing a fact is,
how a fact is caused, how we all are led by
the endless chain of action, and how little
we really participate in our most decisive
and best considered acts. Such an ethics,
leaving the care of useless judgments to
wretched human laws, snatches from life
its very essence and transports it to the
upper regions where it blossoms, sheltered
from contingencies and from the humilia-
tions which social contingencies are. Mystic
morality ignores everything not marked at
the same time with the double seal of the
human and divine. Wherefore, it was
always feared by clergy and magistrates, for
in denying every hierarchy of appearance,
it denies, to the point of abstention, all
social order. A mystic can consent to all
bondages, except that of being a citizen.
Maeterlinck sees the time drawing near
when men will understand each other, soul
to soul, in the same way that the mystic's
soul communes with God. Is it true? Will
men one day be men, proud, free beings who

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

admit no other judgments than God's
judgments? Maeterlinck perceives this
dawn, because he gazes within himself and
is himself a dawn, but if he watched esctemal
humanity, he would only see the impure,
socialistic appetite of troughs and stables.
The humble, for whom he Ijas divinely
written, will not read his book, and if tliey
did read it they would see in it but a mock-
ery, for they have learned that the ideal is
a manger, and they know that their masters
would flog them if they lifted their eyes to
God.

So le Trisor des Humbles^ that book of
liberation and love, makes me think bitterly
of the unhappy condition of man today —
and doubtless in all possible times,

Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se d61ivre
Pour n'ay<»r pas chants la r^ion oA vivre
Quand du stdrile hiver a resplendi I'ennui.

CTfc. I)

And it will be in vain that

Tout soa col secouera cette blanche agonie,

(Tfc. 2)

the hour of deliverance will be past and
only a few will have heard it sound.

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

Nevertheless, what means of hope in these
pages where Maeterlinck, disciple of Ruys-
broeck, Novalis, Emerson and Hello, only
asking of these superior spirits (whose two
lesser had intuitions of genius) the sign of
the hand that stimulates mysterious voy-
ages ! The generality of men, and the more
conscious, who have so many hours of
indifference, would find here encouragement
to enjoy the simplicity of days and muffled
murmurs ol deep life. They would learn
the meaning erf very humble gestures and'
very futile words, and that an infant's laugh
or a woman's prattle equals, by what it
holds of soul and mystery, the most
resplendent words of sages. For Maeter-
linck, with his air of being a sage, and quite
wise, confidently narrates unusual thoughts
with a frankness quite disrespectful of
psychological tradition, and with a boldness
quite contemptuous of mental habits, as-
sumes the courage only to attribute to things
the importance they will have in an ultimate
world. Thus, sensuality is altogether ab-
sent in his meditations. He knows the

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

importance, but also the insignificance of
the stir of blood and nerves, storms that
precede or follow, but never accompany
thought. And if he speaks of women who
are nothing but soul, it is to inquire into
"the mysterious salt which forever con-
serves the memory of the touch of two lips".
Maeterlinck's literature, poems or philos-
ophy, comes in an hour when we have most
need to be fortified and strengthened, in
an hour when it is not immaterial to learn
that the supreme end of life is "to keep open
the highways that lead from the visible to
the invisible." Maeterlinck has not only
kept open the highways frequented by so
many good-intentioned souls, and where
great-minded men here and there open their
arms like oases. It rather seems that he
has increased to infinity the extent of these
highways; he has said "such specious words
in low tones" that the brambles have made
way of themselves, the trees have pruned
themselves spontaneously, a step beyond is
possible, and the gaze today travels farther
than it did yesterday.

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

Others doubtless have or have had a )
richer langu^e, a more fertile imagination, f
a clearer gift of observation, more fancy,
faculties better fitted to trumpet the music
of words. Granted; but with a timid and
poor language, childish dramatic combina-
tions, an almost enervating system of repe-
tition in phraseology, with these awkward-
nesses, with all his awkwardnesses, Maurice
Maeterlinck works at books and booklets
that have a certain originality, a novelty so
truly new that it will long disconcert the
lamentable troop of people who pardon
audacity if there be a precedent — as in
the protocol — but who hold in scorn genius,
which is the perpetual audacity.

£mile verhaeren

\\ • •, . . • .«••

fiMILE VERHAEREN

OF all the poets of today, narcissi
along the river, Verhaeren is the
least obliging m allowing himself to
be admired. He is rude, violent, unskillful.
Busied for twenty years in forging a strange
and magical tool, he remains in a moun-
tain cavern, hammering the reddened irons,
radiant in the fire's reflection, haloed with
sparks. Thus it is we should picture him,
a forger who,

Comme s'il travaillait I'ader des ftmes,

MartMe k grands coups pleins, les lames

Immenses de la patience et du silence.

cnr. a)

If we discover his dwelling and question
him, he replies with a parable whose every
word seems scanned on the forge, and, to
conclude, he delivers a tremendous blow of
his heavy. hammer.

When he is not laboring at his forge, he
goes forth through the fields, head and arms

£mile verhaerei^

bare, and the Flemish fields tell him secrets
they have not yet told anyone. He behblds
miraculous things and is not astonished at
them. Singular beings pass before him,
beings whom everybody jostles without
being aware, visible alone to him. He has
met the November Wind:

Le vent sauvage de novembre,

Le vent,
L'avez-vous rencontr^, le vent
Au carrdour des trois cents routes . • • ?

He has seen Death, and more than once;
he has seen Fear; he has seen Silence

S'asseoir immens^ment du c6ti de la nuit

The characteristic word of Verhaeren*s
poetry is hallucinS. The word leaps from
page to page. An entire collection, the
Campagnes hallucinSes has not freed him
from this obsession. Exorcism was not
possible, for it is the nature and very essence
of Verhaeren to be the hallucinated poet.
"Sensations," Taine said, "are true hallu-
cinations." But where does truth begin or
end? Who shall dare circumscribe it? The

fiMBLE VERHAEREN

poet, with no psychological scruples, wastes
no time over troubling himself to divide
hallucinations into truths or untruths. For
him they are all true if they are sharp and
strong, and he recounts them frankly — and
when the recitation is made by Verhaeren, it
is very lovely. Beauty in art is a relative
result which is achieved by the mixture of
very different elements, often the most
unexpected. Of these elements , one alone
is stable and permanent, and ought to be
found in all combinations: that is novelty.
A work of art must be new, and we recognize
it as such quite simply by the fact that it
gives a sensation not yet experienced.

If it does not give this, a work, perfect
though it be adjudged, is everything that
is contemptible. It is useless and ugly,
since nothing is more absolutely useful than
beauty. With Verhaeren, beauty is made
of novelty and strength. This poet is a
strong man and, since those Villes tentacu-
laires which surged with the violence of a
telluric upheaval, no one dares to deny him
the state and glory of a great poet. Perhaps

l^ILE VERHAEREN

he has not yet quite finished the mag^c
instrument which for twenty years he has
been forging. Perhaps he is not yet master
of his language. He is unequal; he lets his
most beautiful pages grow heavy with
inopportune epithets, and his finest poems
become entangled in what was once called
prosaism. Nevertheless, the impression <rf
power and grandeur remains, and yes: he is
a great poet. Listen to this fragment from
Cathidrales:

— O ces foules, ces foules

£t la misfere et la d^tresse qui les foulent
Comme des houlesl

Les ostensoirs, omis de sdie,
Vers les villes €chafaud£es,
En toits de venre et de cristal,
Du haut du choeur sacerdotal,
Tendent la croix des gothiques id^es.

lis s'imposent dans For des clairs dimanches

— Toussainty NoS, P&ques et Pentecdtes blanches.
lis s'imposent dans I'or et dans I'encens et dans la f£te
Du grand orgue battant du vol de ses temp^tes

— >WHfc^a^- mir-m^^„ .^,

._ J

fiMILE VERHAEREN

Les diapiteaux roiiges et les voAtes vermeilles.

Us sont une kme, en du soldi,

Qui vit de vieux d£oor et d'antique mystere

Autoritaire.

Pourtanty d^ que s'et^ignent le cantique
Et Tantienne naive et prismatique,
Un deuil d'encens £vapor6 s'empreint
Sur les tr^pieds d'argent et les auteb d'airain,

Et les vitraux, grands de si^es ageaouill^
Devant le Christ, avec leurs papes inunobiles
Et leurs martyrs et leurs h^ros, semblent trembler
Au bruit d'un train hautain que passe sur la ville.

CTr. 6)

Verhaeren appears a direct son of Victor
Hugo, especially in his earliest works.
Even after his evolution towards a poetry
more freely feverish, he still remains roman-
tic. Here, to explain this, are four verses
evoking the days of former times.

Jadis — c'^tait la vie errante et somnambule,
A travers les matins et les soirs fabuleux,
Quand la droite de Dieu vers les Cbanaans bleus
Tra$ait la route d'or au fond des cr£puscules.

IfiMILE VERHAEREN

Jadis — c'ftait la vie ftiorme, exasper^e,
Sauvagement pendue aux crins des 6talons,
Soudaine, avec de grands 6clairs k ses talons
£t vers I'espace immense immensement cabr6e.

Jadis — c'^tait la vie ardent, 6vocatoire;
La Croix blanche de del, la Croix rouge d'enfer
Marchaient, k la clart6 des armures de fer,
Chacime k travers sang, vers son del de victoire.

Jadis — c'^tait la vie dcumante et livide,
V6cue et morte, k coups de crime et de tocsins,
Bataille entre eux, de proscripteurs et d'assassins,
Avec, au-dessus d'eux, la mort foUe et splendid.^

(TILT)

These verses are drawn from Villages
illiisoireSy written almost exclusively in
assonant free verse, divided by means of a
gasping rhythm, but Verhaeren, master of
free verse, is also master of romantic verse,
to which he can force, without being dashed
to pieces, the unbridled, terrible gallop of
his thought, drunk with knages, phantoms
and future visions.

¥>

HENRI DE RfiGNIER

HE lives in an old Italian palace where
emblems and figures are written on
walls. He muses, passing from
room to room- Towaixls evening he des-
cends the marble stairs and goes into gardens
flagged like streams, to dream of his life
among fountain basins and ponds, while the
black swans grow alarmed in their nests,
and a peacock, alone like a king, seems to
drink superbly the dying pride of a golden
twilight. De R6gnier is a melancholy,
sumptuous poet. The two words which
most often break forth in his verses are or
and mort (gold and death) and there are
poems where the insistence of this royal and
autumnal rhyme returns and even induces
fear. In the collection of his last works we
could doubtless count more than fifty verses
ending thus: golden birds, golden swans,
golden basins, golden flowers, and dead
lake, dead day, dead dream, dead autumn.

HENRI DE R£QNIER

It is a very curious obsession and s5nnpto-
matic, not of a possible verbal poverty,
rather the contrary, but of a confessed
liking for a particularly rich colour and of
a sad richness like that of a setting sun, a
richness turning into the darkness of night.
Words obtrude themselves upon him
when he wants to paint his impressions and
the color of his dreams; words also obtrude
themselves upon whoever would define him,
and first this one, already written but inev-
itably recurring: richness. De Regnier is
the rich poet par excellence — rich in images.
He has coffers full of them, caves fuU'^of
them, vaults full of them, and unendingly a
file of slaves b^ng him opulent baskets
which he disdainfully empties on the daz-
zling steps of his marble stairs, rainbow-
hued cascades that go gushingly, then
peacefully to form pools and illuminated
lakes. All are not new. To the fittest and
fairest metaphors that came before, Ver-
haeren prefers those he himself creates,
though awkward and formless. De Regnier
does not disdain metaphors that came

<*■«■

HENRI DE RfiGNIER

before, but he refashions them and converts
them to his own use by modifying their
setting, imposing new proximities on them,
meanings still unknown. If among these
reworked images some of virgin matter are
found, the impression such poetry gives will
none the less be altogether original. In
working thus, the bizarre and the obscure
are avoided; the reader is not rudely thrown
into a labyrinthine forest; he recovers his
path, and his joy in gathering new flowers
is doubled by the joy of gathering familiar
ones. .

Le temps triste a fleuri ses heures en fleurs mortes,
T/An qui passe a jauni ses jours en feuilles sfeches.
L'Aube p&le s'est vue h, des eaux mornes
Et les faces du soir ont saign6 sous les filches
Du vent mystdrieux qui rit et qui sanglote.

(TR. 8)

Such a poetry certainly charms.

De Regnier in verse can tell everything
he wishes, his subtlety is infinite; he notes
indefinable nuances of dreams, impercep-
tible apparitions, fugitive decorations. A
naked hand, slightly shriveled, that leans

HENRI DE RfiGNIER

upon a marble table; fruit that swings in
the wind and drops; an abandoned pool —
such nothings suffice, and the poem springs
forth, perfect and pure. His verse is very
evocative; in several syllables he forces his
vision on us.

Je sais de tristes eauz en qui meurent les soirs;

Des fleurs que nul n'y cueille y tombent une k une . . .

CTr. 0)

Different again in this from Verhaeren, he
is absolute master of his language. Whether
his poems are the result of long or brief
labor, they bear no mark of effort, and it is
not without amazement, nor even without
admiration, that we follow the straight,
noble progress of his fair verses, white
ambling nags harnessed in gold that sinks
into the glory of evenings.

Rich and fine, de R^gnier's poetry is never
purely lyrical; he encloses an idea in the
engarlanded circle of his metaphors, and no
matter how vague or general this idea may
be, it suffices to strengthen the necklace;
the pearls are held by a thread, invisible

HENRI DE RfiGNIER

sometime, but always solid, as in these few
verses:

L'Aubefut si p&le hier

Siir les doux pr6s et sur ies prtles,

Qu'au matin clair

Un enfant vint parmi les herbes,

Penchant sxu: elles

Ses mains pures qui y cueillaient des asphodMes.

Midi fut lourd d'orage et mome de soleil

Au jardin mort de gloire en son sommeil

L^thargique de fleurs et d'arbres,

L'eau ^tait dure k Toeil comme du marbre,

Le marbre tifede et clair comme de Teau,

£t Tenfant qui vint £tait beau,

V6tu de poupre et laur^ d'or,

£t Jongtemps on voyait de tige en tige encor,

Une k une, saigner les pivoines leur sang

De p6tale8 au passage du bel Enfant.

L'Enf ant qui vint ce soir 6tait nu,

n cueillait des roses dans I'ombre,

n sanglotait d'etre venu,

n reculait devant son ombre,

C'est en lui nu

Que mon Destin s'est reconnu.

(Tr. 10)

HENRI DE RfiGNIER

Simple episode of a longer poem, itself a
fragment pf a book, this little triptych has
several meanings and tdls different things
as one leaves it in its place or isolates it;
here, an ims^e of a particular destiny; there,
a general image of life, while yet again, one
may there see an example of free verse truly
perfect and shaped by a master.

FRANCIS VIELfi<;RIFFIN

FRANCIS VIELfi-GRIFFIN

I DO not wish to say that Viel6-Griffin is
a joyous poet; nevertheless, he is the
poet of joy. With him, we share the
pleasures of a normal, simple life, the certi-
tude of beauty, the invincible youthf ulness of
nature. He is neither violent, sumptuous nor
sweet : he is calm. Though very subjective,
or because of this, for to think of oneself is
to think of oneself completely, he is religious.
Like Emerson he is bound to see "images of
the most ancient religion" in nature, and
to think, again like Emerson : "It seems that
a day has not been entirely profane, in
which some attention has been given to the
things of nature." One by one he knows
and loves the elements of the forest, from
the "great gentle ash trees" to the "million
young plants," and it is his very own forest,
his personal and original forest:

FRANCIS VIELfi-GRIFFiN

Sous ma f or^t de Mai fleure tout ch6vref euille,
Le soldi goutte en or par I'ombre grasse,
Un chevreuil bruit dans les feuilles qu'il cueille,
La brise en la frise des bouleaux passe,
De feuille en f euille.

Par ma plaine de mai toute herbe s^argente,

Le soleil y luit comme au jeu des ^p^es,

Une abeille vibre aux muguets de la sente

De^ hautes fleurs vers le ru groupies.

La brise en la frise des fr6nes chante . • •

cnt. 11)

But he knows other flowers than those
which are common to glades; he knows the
flower-that-sings, she who sings, lavendar,
sweet marjoram or fay, in the old garden of
ballads and tales. The popular songs have
left refrains in his memory which he blends
in little poems, and which are their com-
mentary or fancy:

OA est la Marguerite,

gu^, 6 gue,
OA est la Marguerite?

EUe est dans son chateau, coeur las et fatigu^,
£lle est dans son hameau, coeur enfantile et gai,
EUe est dans son tombeau, semons-y du muguet,

O gu6, la Marguerite.

(TlR. 12)

FRANCIS VIELfi-GRIFFIN

And this is almost as pure as Gerard de
Nerval's Cydalises:

OH sont DOS amoureuMS?

Elles soQt ftu tombeau;

Elles sont plus heureuses

Dans un s£jour plus beau • • •

rnt. 13)

And almost as innocently cruel as this
round which the little girls sing and dance
to:

La beaut6, a quoi sert-€lle?

Elle sert k aller en terre,

£tre mangde par les verSi

£tre mang6e par les vers • • •

rnt. 14)

Viel^-Griffin has used the popular poetry
discreetly — ^that poetry of such little art that
it seems increate — but he would have been
less discreet had he misused it, for he has
the sentiment and respect for it. Other
poets, unfortunately, have been less prudent
and have collected the rose-that-talks with
such clumsy or rough hands that we wish
an eternal silence had been conjured around
a treasure now sullied and vilified.

FRANCIS VIELfi-GBIFFIN

like the forest, the sea enchants axul
intoxicates Viele-Griffin; he has called it
all things in his earliest verses, that already
remote Cueille d'Avril; the insatiaUe de-
vouring sea, abyss and tomb, the savage
sea with triumi^at haughty swell, the sea
wantoning after voluptuous voids, the furious
sea, the heedless sea, the stubborn, dumb
sea, the envious sea painting its face with
stars or suns, dawns or midnights — and
the poet reproaches it for its flown glory:

Ne sens-tu pas en toi Topulence de n'^tre
Que pour toi seule belle, 6 Mer, et d'etre toi ?

then he proclaims his pride at not having
followed the sea's example, at not having
sued glory with happy reminiscences or bold
plagiarisms. It must be recognized that
Viele-Griffin, who before did not lie, has
since kept his word. He has indeed re-
mained himself, truly free, truly proud and
truly wild. His forest is not limitless, but
it is not a banal forest, it is a domaio*

FRANCIS VIELfi-GRtFFIN

I do not speak of the very important part
he has had in the difficult conquest of free
verse; my impression is more general and
deeper and concerns itself not only with the
form, but with the essence of his art.
Through Francis Viele-Griffin there is some-
thing new in French poetry.

STEPHANE MALLARMfi

STfiPHANE MALLARMfi

WITH Verlaine, St6phane Mallarm*
is the poet who has had the most
direct influence on the poets of
today. Both were Parnassians and first
Baudelairians.

Per me ^ va tra la perduta gente.

(Tft. le)

With them one descends along the gloomy
mountain to the doleful city of Fleurs du
Mai. All the jn-esent literature and es-
pecially that which is called symbolistic, is
Baudelairian, not doubtless by its external/
technique, but by its internal and spHrituaR
technique,/by the sense of mystery, by the!
anxious careT» hear what things say, by thei
desire to harmonize, from soul to soul, with
the obscure thought diffused in the night of
the world, according to those so often quoted
and repeated verses^

La nature est un temple oi^ de vivants {Hliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
Lliomme y passe i, travers des for^ts de symboles
Qui Tobsenrent avec des r^ards familiers.

STfiPHANE KALLARM£

Cosime de longs fchos qui de loin se confondent

Dans une t6nebreuse et profonde unite,

Vaste comme la nuit et oomme la clart6,

Les parfums, les coukurs et les sons se r^pondent.

CTtt. 17)

Baudelaire had read the first poems of
Mallarm^ before dying. He was troubled ;
poets do not like to leave a brother or son
behind them. They would like to be alone
and have their genius perish with their
brain. But Mallarm^ was Baudelairian
only by filiation. His so precious originality
quickly asserted itself. His Proses^ his
Apres-midi d'un Faune, his Sonnets, came,
at too long intervals, to tell of the marvelous
subtlety of his patient, disdainful, imperi-
ously gentle genius. Having voluntarily
killed in him the spontaneity of being
impressionable, the gifts of the artist by
d^rees replaced the gifts of the poet. He
loved words more for their possible sensg^
than for their true sense, and combined
thera lA mosaics of a refined simplicity. It
has been wdl said of him that, like Perseus
or Martial, he was a difficult authcH*. Yes,
and like Anderson's man who wove invisible

ST£FHANE MALLARMfi

threads, MaUarm^ assembles gems colored
by his dreams, whose richness our care does
not always succeed in divining. But it
would be absurd to suppose that he is
incomprehensible. The trick of quoting
certain verses, obscure by their isolation, is
not loyal, for, even in fragments, Mallarme's
poetry, when good, is incomparably so, and
if later in a corroded book ^we ^only_find
these debris:

La diair est triste, hdasi et j'ai lu tous les livres.
Fuir! la-bas fuir! Je sens que des oiseaux scmt ivres
D'toe panni recume inconnue et les deux . • •

Un autonme joodni de taudbss de rousseur .
£t tu fis la blancbeur sanglotante des lys . •
Je t'appc^te Tenfant d'une nuit d'ldum^e . ,
Taut son col aecouera oette blanche agonie

• •

CTIL 18)

we must attribute them to a poet who was
an artist to the highest degree. Oh! that
sonnet of the swan (of which the last verse^
quoted above is the ninth) where all the
words are white as snow !

STfiPHANE MAMARMfi

But everything possible has been written
on this beloved poet. I end with this
comment.

Recently a question, something like this,
was asked:

"Who, in the admiration of the young
poets, will replace Verlaine, who had re-
placed Leconte de Lisle?"

Few of those questioned answered. Two-
thirds of those who abstained were influ-
enced by the ridiculous appearance of such
an ultimatum. How in short could it be
that a young poet should admire, "exclu-
sively and successively," three "masters"
so different as those two and Mallarme —
incontestably chosen? Thus, many were
silent because of scruples — but I now vote,
saying: Greatly loving and admiring Ste-
phane Mallarme, I do not see that Verlaine's
death is a decent reason for loving and
admiring him more today than yesterday.

Nevertheless, since it is a strict duty ever
to sacrifice the dead to the living and to
give the living, by an increase of glory, an
increase of energy, the result of the vote

STfiPHANE MALLARMfi

pleases me, and we, who were silent, would
have been bound to speak. What a pity if
too much abstention had perverted the
truth ! For, informed by a circular, the press
in this item has found a motive the more for
laughing and pitymg us, as long as, riding
on the inky waves of the sea of intellectual
night, but subduer of shipwreckers, the
name of Mallarme, at last written on the
ironic elegance of a racing cutter, sails and
now defies the emptiness and the bitter-
sweet foam of the hoax«

ALBERT SAMAIN

'■' ■". ..i;i

ALBERT SAMAIN

WHEN they know by heart what is
pure in Verlaine, the young women
of today and tomorrow set out to,
dream Au Jar din de V Infante. With all
that he owes to the author of Fetes Galantes
(he owes him less than one might suppose),
Albert Samain is one of the most original
and charming poets, the sweetest and most
delicate of poets:

En robe heliotrope, et sa pens^ au doigts,

Le rfive passe, la ceinture d6nou&,

Fr61ant les 4mes de sa tralne de nuee,

Au rhytme dteint d'une musique d'autrefois . • .

(TR. 19)

One must read the whole little poem
which commences thus:

Dans la lente douceur d'unsoirdesdemiers jours . . .

CTR. ao)

It is pure and beautiful as any poem in
the French language, and its art has the

ALBERT SAMAIN

simplicity of works deeply felt and long
pondered over. Free verse, new poetry!
Here are verses which make us understand
the vanity of prosodists and the awkward-
ness of the too clever players on the zither.
A soul is there.

Samain's sincerity is wonderful. I think
he would be ashamed to give .variations on
sensations unexplored by his experience.
Sincerity here does not mean candor, nor
simplicity gaucherie. He is sincere, not
because he avows all his thoughts, but
because he thinks of all his avowals. And
he is simple because he has studied his art
until he knows its last secrets and effort-
lessly gives forth these secrets with an
unconscious mastery:

Les roses du couchant s'effeuillent sur le fleuve;
£t, dans l'6motion p41e du soir tombant,
S'^voque un pare d'autortine oil r^ve sur un banc
Ma jeunesse d6j^ grave comme une veuve . . .

(Tr. 21)

This is, it seems, like a Vigny made tender
and consenting to the humility of a melan-
choly quite simple and stripped of scarves.

ALBERT SAMAIN

He is not only softened. He is tender, and
what passion and sensuality, but so delicate !

Tu; marchais chaste dans la robe de ton kme,
Que le d^sir suivait comme un f airne dompt6,
Je respirais parmi le soir, 6 puret6,
Mon r^e envelopp6 dans tes voiles de femme.

(Ttt. 22)

A delicate sensuality, which is really the
impression his verses should give to conform
to his poetics, where h6 dreams

De vers blonds oii le sens fluide se delie
Comme sous Teau la chevelure d'Oph^lie,

De vers silencieux, et sans rythme et sans trame,
Oii la rime sans bruit glisse comme une rame,

De vers d'une andenne 6toSe 6xtenuee,
Impalpable comme le son et la nu^,

De vers de soirs d'automne ensorcelant les heures
Au rite feminin des syllabes mineures,

De vers de soirs d'amours 6nerv& de verveine,
Od I'&me sente^ exquise^ une caresse i, peine . . .

CHl 28)

But, this pK>et who would only love nuance,
Verlainian nuance, could on some occasions

ALBERT SAMAIN

be a violent colorist or a vigorous hewer of
marble. This other Samain, older and not
less genuine, is revealed in parts of his
collection called Evocations. It is a Par-
nassian Samain, but always personal, even
in grandiloquence. The two sonnets enti-
tled Cliopdtre have a beauty not only of
expression but of ideas; it is neither pure
music nor pure plastic art. The poem is
complete and alive, a strange, disconcerting
marble; yes, a living marble whose life
stirs and fertilizes the very desert samds,
around the momentarily enamoured Sphinx.
Such is this poet: powerfully delicious in
the art of making all the bells and all the
souls vibrate in harmony. All souls are in
love with this "child in robes of state."

PIERRE QUILLARD

IT was in the already far-oflf and perhaps
heroic times of the Art Theatre; we
were brought to hear and see la Fille
aux Mains couples: To me there remains
a most pleasant, complete and perfect
memory of a play that truly gave the ex-
quisite and keen sensation of the definitive.
That hardly endured an hour; of it remains
verses which makes a poem with difficulty
forgotten.

Pierre Quillard has reunited his early
poetic writings under a title which for more
than one will be presumptuous: La Gloire
du Verbe. To dare this, is to be sure of
oneself; to have the consciousness of mas-
tery; to affirm, more or less, that coming
after Leconte de Lisle and De Heredia, one
will not flag in a craft demanding, along with
splendor of imagination, a singular sureness
of hand. He has not lied; a very skillful
setter, he truly glorifies the multiple jewels

PIERRE QUILLARD

of the word. He makes the water of pearls
smile and the rainbow of decomix)sed dia-
monds laugh.

Captain of a galley filled with preciousf
slaves, he sails among the tempting perils
of purple archipelagos (as the Greek isles
are said to appear at certain hours), and
when the nght comes he seeks the sandy
shore of a violet gulf,

Dans la splendeur des dairs de lune violets.

(TR. 24)

And he stays for the divine apparition:

Alors des profondeurs et des t&i^bres saintes
Comme un jeune soleil sort des gouffres marins,
Blanche, laissant couler des 6paules aux reins
Ses cheveux oii nageaient de pftles hyadnthes,
Une femme surgit • . •

whose eyes are gulfs of joy, love and terror,
and where one sees reflected the whole
world of things from grass to the infinity of
seas. And she speaks: 'Toet who, anfiidst
life, exhibits astonishments and desires
and loves, you appear moved by sensual

PIERRE QUnXARD

joys and you suffer, for these joys you feel
are truly vain, but

Si tu n'6treins que des chim^eSy si tu bois
L^enivrement de vins illusoires, qu'importel
Le soldi meurt; la f oule imaginaire est morte
Mais le monde subsiste en ta seule ftme: voisl
Les jours se sont f an^ comme des roses brfeves,
Mab ton Verbe a cr£6 le miraj^ oQ tu vis . . .

(TB. 26)

and my beauty, you give it form and gesture;
I am your creation, I exist because you
think of me and because you evoke me/'

Such is the leading idea of that Gloire du
Verhcy one of the rare poems of that time,
where the idea and word march in harmoni-
ous rhythm.

At simrise the galley again set sail: Pierre
Quillard departed for distant coimtries.

His is a pagan soul, or which would like
to be pagan, for if his eyes e^erly seek
sensible beauty, his dream lingers, wishing
to force the portal behind which sleeps the
beauty enclosed in things. He is truly the
more disturbed that he deigns not to men-
tion it, and the glance of the captives

PIERRE QUILLARD

disturbs him with more than a shudder.
As he knows all the theogonies and all
literatures,

J'ai connu tons les dieux du del et de la terre,

(TR. 27)

as he has drunk at all sources, he knows
more than one way to get intoxicated:
dilettante of a superior kind, when he will
have worn out the joy of sailing, when he
will have chosen his residence (doubtless
near an old, holy fountain), having collected
much, having sown many noble seeds, he
will see himself master of a royal garden
and of a people odorous with flowers.

Fleuis 6temelles, fleurs £gales aux dieuxl

A. FERDINAND HEROLD

THE danger of free verse is that it
remains amorphous, that its rhythm,
too little accentuated, givesSt some
of the characteristics of prose. The finest
verse truly remains, it seems to me, the
verse formed of a regular number of full
or accented syllables and in which the
position of the accents is evident and not
left to the choice of the reader or declaimer;
not only poets read verse, and it is impru-
dent to place reliance on the chance of
interpretations. One rightly supix)ses that
I would not amuse myself by quoting such
verses as seemed to me wretched ; and above
all I would not go to seek them in the poems
of Herold, to whom the preference would
be unmerited. Not that Herold possesses
the gift of rhythm to a high point, but he
has it sufficiently to give his poetry the
grace of a living thing, sweetly and languidly
living. He is a poet of gentleness; his

A. FERDINAND HEROLD

poetry is blond, with pearls in its blond,
pure hair, and necklaces and rings, elegant,
fine gems, on neck and fingers. This word
is the beloved word of the poet; his heroines
are flowered with gems as much as his
gardens are flowered with lillies.

La blonde, la blanche, la bdk Dames des Lys.

(Tft. 20)

He loved her, but what others, what queens
and saints! Reader of forgotten books, he
finds precious legends there which he trans-
poses to short poems, often of a sonnet's
length. He alone knows these queens,
Marozie, Anf elize, Bazine, Paryze, Qrable or
Aelis, and those saints, Nonita, Berdlla,
Richardis — Gemma! She is the first he
has thought of; her he gives the most
attractive place in the stained glass window,
happy again to write that woixi whose
charm he feels.

Herold is one of the most objective of the
new poets; he hardly tells of himself; he
requires themes tiiat are foreign to his life,
and he even chooses those that seem f ordgn

A. FERDINAND HEROLD

ing for that, nor his saints less pure- One
finds these panels and church windows in'
the collecticMi entitled Chevaleries sentimen-
taleSy the most important and most charac-
teristic of his works. It is a truly pleasant
reading and one passes sweet hours among
those ladies, lilies, gems, and autumn roses.

Les roses d'automne s'6tioleiit,

Les roses qui fleurissaient les tombes;

Lentement s'effeuiUent les corolles

£t le sol froid est jonch6 de petales qui tombent.

(Tr. Vh

Has not this a quite gentle melancholy?
And this:

n y a des maisons qui pleurent snr le port^

II y a des glas qui soiment dans les doch«:s,

Od tintent des doches vagues:

Vors quds fleuves de mort

Les vierges ont-dles march6,

Les vierges q^ avaient aux doigts de Uondes bagues?

, (TR. 31)

Thus, without forcing his talent to an
impassi(»ied expression of life, an effort at
which he doubtless would be unskillful,

A- FERDINAND HEROLD

without laying claim to gifts he lacks,
Herold has created for his pleasiire a poetry
of grace, purety, tenderness and sweetness.
If we demanded everything of the same
poet, who would answer? The essential
thing is to have a garden, to work there with
the spade and sow sjeeds; the flowers that
will shoot forth, carnations, peonies or
vicJets, will have their value and their
charm, according to the hour and the season.

ADOLPH RETTfi

BY its fecundity in poets, the day we
live in and which has already lasted
ten years, can hardly be compared
with any of the vanished days, even those
ridiest in sunshine and flowers. There were
fair morning excursions in the dew, following
the footsteps of Ronsard; there was a lovely
afternoon when Theophile's weary viol
sighed, heard between the oboes and the
bass-trombones; there was the stormy
romantic day, somlxe and royal, interrupted
towards evening by the cry of a woman
whom Baudelaire was strangling; there
was the Parnassian nKX>nlight, and the
Verlainian s\m rose — and we are there in
full nocm, in the midst of a wide country
pwx)vided with everything necessary for the
making of verse: plants, flowers, streams,
rivulets, woods, caves and young women so
fredi that coie would say their thoughts
were newly hatched from an ingenuous
brain.

ADOLPH RETTfi

The wide country is quite full of poets
who walk, no longer in troops as in Ron-
sard's time, but alone and with a slightly
sullen air; they greet each other from afar
with brief gestures. Not all have names
and several of them never will have any.
How shall we call them? Let them play
on while this person overtakes us and tells
us something of his dream.

He is Adolphe Rette.

He is recognizable among them all by his
dissolute and almost wild appearance. He
crushes the flowers, if he does not gather
them, and with reeds he makes rafts,
throwing them to the tide, towards peril,
towards the morrow. But he smiles and
grows languid when young girls pass. Une
belle dame passa • • • and he spoke:

Dame des lys amoureux et pftm6s,
Dames des lys langnissants et f ands,
Triste aux yeiix de belladone —

Dame d'un r^ve de roses royales,
Dame des sombres roses nuptiales^
Fr^le comme une madone —

ADOLPH RETTfi

Dame de del et de ravissement,
Dame d'extase et de renoncement.
Chaste £toile trte lointaiiie —

Dame d'enfer, ton sourire faroiKhe,
Dame du diable, un baiser de ta bouche,
C'est le feu des mauvaises fontaines
Et je brCde si je te touche.

(Tr. 89)

The fair lady passed, but without being
affected by the final imprecation, which she
doubtless attributed to excess of love. She
passed, giving the poet smile for smile.

This idyll had an admiraUe plaint for its
first epilogue^

Hon ime, il rae semUe que tous ties un jardiB . . .

CnL33)

a garden where one sees, hanging on the
hedges, in the evening mist, shreds of the
vail

De la Dame qui est pass^e.

mt. 8A)

Sometime after this adventure, we learned
that Rette, returned from a voyage to the
Archipel en fleurs^ had enriched himself

ADOLPH RETTfi

with a new collection of dreams. He will
yet s^ain enrich himself. His talent is a
living shoot grafted on a stout wild stock of
glorious viridity. A poet, Adolphe Rett6 has
only the sense of rhythm and the passion
for words. He loves ideas and he loves
them when they are new and even excessive.
He wishes to be freed of all the old prejudices
and he would equally like to free his brothers
in social bondage. His last books, la Foret
bruissante and SimiUttideSy affirm this ten-
dency. The one is a lyrical poem; the
other, a dramatic poem in prose, very simple,
very curious and very extraordinary by the
mixture there seen of the sweet dreams of a
tender poet and the somewhat rigid and
naive fancies of the Utopian anarchist. But
without naivete, that is to say, without
freshness of soul, would poets exist?

VILUERS DE LISLE ADAM

VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM.

SOME take pleasure, an awkward tes-
timony of a piously troubled admira-
tion, in saying and even in basing a
paradoxical study on the saying: ''Villiers
de L' Isle-Adam was neither of his country
nor time." This seems preposterous, for a
superior man, a great writer is, in fine, by his
very genius, one of the syntheses of his race
and epoch, the representative of a momen-
tary humanity, the brain and mouth of a
whole tribe and not a fugitive monster.
Like Chateaubriand, his brother in race and
fame, Villiers was the man of the moment,
and of a solemn moment. Both, with
differing views and under diverse appear-
ances, recreated the soul of the choice
spirits of a period; from one arose romantic
Catholicism and that respect for the old
traditional stones; and from the other, the
idealistic dream and that cult of antique
interior beauty. But the one was yet the

VILLIERS DE L'lSLE-ADAM

proud ancestor of our savage individualisnij
and the other taught us that the life around
is the only clay to be shaped. ViUiers
belonged to his time to such a degree that
all his masterpieces are dreams solidly
based on science and modem metaphysics,
like VEve Future or TrihtUai Bonhomet^ that
enormous, admirable and tragic piece of
buffoonery, where all the gifts of the dreamer,
ironist and philosopher come to converge,
so as to form perhaps the most original
creation of the century.

This point cleared, we declare that Vil-
liers, being of prodigious complexity, natu-
rally lends himself to contradictory inter-
pretations. He was everything, a new
Goethe, but if less conscious and less perfect,
keener, more artful, more mysterious, more
human, and more familiar. He is always
among us and in us, by his work and by the
influence of his work, which exultantly goes
through the best of the writers and artists
of the actual hour. He has reopened the
gates of the beyond, closed with what a
crash we remember, and through these

VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM

gates a whole generation was hurled to
infinity. The ecclesiastic hierarchy num-
bers among her clerks, by the side of the
exorcists, the porters, they who must open
the door of the sanctuary to all the well-
intentioned. Villiers exercised these two
functions for us: he was the exorcist of the
real arid the porter of the ideal.

Complex, but we may see a double
spirit in him. There were two essentially
dissimilar writers in him, the romanticist
and the ironist. The romanticist was the
first to come to birth and the last to die:
Elen and Morgane; Akedysseril and Axel.
Villiers, the ironist, author of Tribulat
Bonhomety is intermediate between these
two romantic phases; VEve future should be
described as a mixture of these two so
diverse elements, for the book with its
overwhelming irony is also a book of love.

Villiers at once realized himself by fancy
and irony, making his fancy ironic, when life
disgusted him even with fancy. No one
has been more subjective. His characters
are created with particles of his soul,

VILLIERS DE UISLE^ADAM

raised, in the same way as a mystery, to
the state of authentic, complete souls. If
it is a dialogue, he will cause a certain
character to utter philosophies quite above
his normal understanding of things. In
Axel^ the abbess speaks of hell ais Villiers
might have spoken of Hegelianism, whose
deceptions he learned towards the end,
after having accepted its lai^e certitudes
in the beginning: ''It is done! the child
already experiences the ravishment and in-
toxications of Hell!" He experienced
them: as a Baudelairian, he loved blas-
phemy for its occult effects, the immense
risk of a pleasure taken at the expense of
God himself. Sacrilege is in acts, blas-
phemy in words. He believed in words
more than in realities, which are but the
tangible shadows of words, for it is quite
evident, and by a very simple syllogism,
that if there is no thought in the absence
of words, no more is there matter in the
absence of thought. He believed in the
power of words to the point of superstition.
The only visible corrections of the second

VnXIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM

over the first text of Axel, for example,
consist in the adjunction of words of a
special ending, as when, to evoke an ecclesi-
astic and conventual society, he uses pro-
ditoire, prSmanitoire, satisfactoire, and
fruition^ collaudation^ etc. This very sense
of the mystic powers of syllabic articulation
stimulates him towards the quest of names
as strange as le Desservant de Voffice des
Morts, a church function which never existed
unless at the monastery of Saint ApoUodora;
or /' Homme-qui-marche-souS'terre, a name no
Indian carried outside of the scenes of the
Nouveau-Monde.

In a very old rough draft of a page
belonging perhaps to PEve future he has
thus defined the real:

"Now I say that the Real has its degrees
of being. A thing is so much more or less
real for us as it interests us more or less,
since a thing that interested us not at all
would for us be as if it were not — that is to
say, much less, though physical, than an
unreal thing that interested us.

"The Real for us, then, isonly what

VnXIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM

.•' f

touches the senses or the mind; and ac-
cording to the degree of intensity with
which this sole realy which we can judge and
name, affects us, we class in our mind the
degree of being more or less rich in content
as it seems to strike us, and it is conse-
quenty legitimate to say that it is realized.

'The idea is the only control we have of
realiiy.^^

Again:

"And on the top of a distant pine, solitary
in the midst of a far-off glade, I heard the
nightingale — ^unique voice of that silence . . .

" Toetic' landscapes almost invariably
leave me quite cold, seeing that for every
serious man the most suggestive medium for
ideas really poetic is no other than four
walls, a table and silence. Those who do
not carry within them the soul of everything
the world can show them, will do well to
watch it: they will not recognize it, each
thing being beautiful only according to the
thought of him who gazes at it and reflects
it in himself. Faith is essential in poetry
as in religion, and faith has no need of

VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM

seeing with corporeal eyes to contemplate
that which it recognizes much better in
itself ..." ^

Such ideas were many times, under mul-
tiple forms, always new, expressed by Vil-
liers de L' Isle-Adam in his works. Without
going as far as Berkeley's pure negations,
which nevertheless are but the extreme
Ic^c of subjective idealism, he admitted in
his conception of life, on the same plan, the
Interior and the Exterior, Spirit and Matter,
with a very visible tendency to give the
first term domination over the second. For
him the idea of progress was never anything
but a subject for jest, together with the
nonsense of the humanitarian positivists
who teach, reversed mythology, that terres-
trial paradise, a superstition if we assign it
the past, becomes the sole legitimate hope
if we place it in the future.

On the contrary, he makes a protagonist
(Edison doubtless) say in a short fragment
of an old manuscript of r Eve future:

"We are in the ripe age of Humanity,
that is alll Soon will come the senility and

VnXIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM

decrepitude of this strange polyp, and the
evolution accomplished, his mortal return to
the mysterious laboratory where all the
Ghosts eternally work their experiments, by
grace of some ungueslionahle necessity.^'

And in this last word, Villiers mocks his
belief in God. Was he Christian? He be-
cafne one towards the end of his life: thus he
knew all the forms of intellectual intoxi-
cation.

LAURENT TAILHADE

INDIVIDUALISM, which in literature
gives us such agreeable baskets of new
flowers, often finds itself made sterile
by the introduction' of the evil weeds of
arrogance. One sees young persons, quite
puffed up with a monstrous infatuation,
declare their intention, not only to produce
their work, but at the same the Work, to
produce the unique flower, after which the
exhausted intelligence must cease being
fecimd and collect itself in the slow dim
task of the reorganization of strength.
Even in Paris there are two or three "ma-
chines of glory" which have arrogated to
themselves alone the right to pronounce this
word, which they have banished from the
dictionary. That matters little, for the
spirit blows where it lists, and when it blows
under the skin of frogs and makes them
huge, it is for its own amusement, for the
world is sad.

xoz

LAURENT TAILHADE

Tailhade has none of the grotesque de-
fects of pride; no one has more simply pur-
sued a more simple craft, that of the man of
letters. The Romans used a word "rhet-
orician", and this signified he who speaks,
subdues words and subjects them to the
yoke of thought; he governs, prompts and
stimulates them to the point of imposing, in
the very hour of his imaginative work, the
hardest, newest, and most dangerous of
tasks. Latin by race and tastes, Tailhade
has the right to this fine name of rhetorician
at which the incompetence of pedants takes
offence. He is a rhetorician like Petronius,
master equally in prose and poetry.

Here, taken from the rare Douzain de
Sonnets 9 is one of them:

HfiLENE

(Le laboratoire de Faust i. Wittembei^g)

Des &ges evolus j'ai remont6 le fleuve, ,
Et le coeur emvr6 de sublimes desseins,
D6sert6 le Hadte et les ombrages saints,
Oix r&me d'une pais inefiable s'abreuve.

I02

LAURENT TAILhIaDE

Le Temps n'a pu fl^chir la courbe de mes seins.
Je suis toujours debout et forte dans T^preuve,
Moi, r^tamelle vierge et I'^temelle veuve,
Gloire dUellas, paimi la guerre aux noiis tocsins.

O Faust, je viens k toi, quittant le sein des MferesI
Pour toi, j'abandonnai, sur I'aile des diim^res,
L'ombre p&le oii les dieuz gisent, ensevelis.

J'apporte k ton amour, de fond des deux antiques.
Ma gorge dont le Temps n'a pas vaiilcu les lys
Et ma voix assouplie aux rythmes prophetiques.

(Tr.35)

Having written this and Vitraux, poems
which a disdainful mysticism oddly seasons,
and that Terre latine^ prose of such affecting
beauty, perfect and unique pages of an
almost sorrowful purity of style, Tailhade
suddenly made himself famed and feared by
the cruel and excessive satires which he
called, as a souvenir and witness of a voyage
we all make without profit, Au pays du
Mtifle. The ignominy of the age exasper-
ates the Latin, charmed with sunshine and
perfumes, lovely phrases and comely ges-
tures, and for whom money is the joy we
throw, like flowers, under the steps of women
and not the ;^«"oductive seed which we bury

103

LAURENT TAILHADE

that it may sprout. There he reveals him-
self the haughty executioner of hypocricies
and greeds, of false glories and real turpi-
tudes, of money and success, of the parvenu
of the Bourse and the parvenu of the feuille-
ton. Harshly and even unjustly he lashes
his own aversions. For him, as for all the
satirists, the particular enemy becomes the
public enemy, but what beautiful language
at once traditional and new, and what grand
insolence !

Ce que j 'ecris n'est pas pour ces charognes !

No more are Tailhade's ballads destined
to make dream the handsome ladies who fan
themselves with peacock plumes. It is
difficult to quote even one of the verses.
This one is not very bad :

Bourget, Maupassant et Loti,
Se trouvent dans toutes les gares
On les offre avec le rdti,
Bouiget, Maupassant et Loti.
De ces auteurs soyez loti
En m&Qie temps que de dgares:
Bourget, Maupassant et Loti
Se trouvent dans toutes les gares.

(TIL 86)
104

LAURENT TAILHADE

The Quatorzatn d*EtS can be given in full
and it is even good to know it by heart, for
it is a marvel of subtlety and a little genre
picture to care for and preserve. The epi-
graph, that verse of Rimbaud, in the Pre-
tnieres Communions^

Elle fait la victime et la petite Spouse,

(Tr. 37)

gives the tone of the frame:

Certes, monsieur Benoist approuve les gens qui
Ont lu Voltaire et sont aux J6suites adverses.
n i)ense. H est idoine aux longues controverses,
n adsi)eme le moine et le th^riaki.

M^e il fut orateur d'une loge dcossaise.
Toutefois — car sa legitime croit en Dieu —
La'^Petite Benoist^ voiles blancs, ruban bleu,
Communia. Ca fait qu'on boit maint litre it seize.

Chez le bistro, parmi les bancs empouacr6s,
Le billard somnolent et les gar^ons vautr^s,
Rougit la pucelette aux gants de filoselle.

Gr, Benoist, qui s'^m^che et toume au calotin,
Montre quelque plaisir d'avoir vu, ce matin,
L'hymen du Fils unique et de sa demoiselle.

(Tr. M)

los

LAURENT TAILHADE

So, with much less wit, Sidonius Appol-
linaiis scoffed the Barbarians among whom
the unkindness of the times forced him to
live, and like the Bishop c^ Clermont, it is
not in vain that Laurent Tailhade scoffs and
chaffs them, for his epigrams will pass beyond
the actual time. Meanwhile, I regard him
as one of the most authentic glories of the
present French letters.

io6

JULES RENARD

A MAN rises eariy and walks through
deserted roads and lanes; he fears
neither dew nor brambles, nor the
action of the branches of hedges. He gazes,
listens, smells, pursues the birds, the wind,
flowers, images. Without haste, but never-
theless anxiously, for she has a delicate ear,
he seeks nature, whom he would surprise in
her refuge; he finds her, she is there; then,
the twigs gently brushed away, he contem-
plates her in the blue shadow of her retreat
and, without having wakened her, closing
the curtain, he returns to his home. Before
falling asleep, he counts his images: "gently
they are reborn at the beck of memory."

Jules Renard has given himself this
name: the hunter of images. He is a
singularly fortimate and privileged hunter,
for alone among his colleagues, he only
captures, beasts or little creatures, un-
published prey. He scorns the known, or

109

JULES RENARD

knows it not; his collection is only of the
rare and even unique heads, but which he
is in no trouble to put under lock, for they
belong to him in such wise that a thief
would purloin them in vain. So penetrat-
ing and attested a personality has some-
thing disconcerting, irritating and, accord-
ing to some envious persons, extravagant.
'*I>o then as we do, take the old accumu-
lated metaphors from the common treas-
ury; we go swiftly and it is very convenient."
But Jules Renard disbelieves in going
swiftly. Though unusually industrious, he
produces little, and especially little at a
time, like those patient engravers who
carve steel with geologic slowness.

When studying a writer, one loves (it is
an inveterate habit bequeathed us by
Sainte-Beuve) to discern his spiritual family,
enumerate his ancestors, establish learned
coimections, and note, at the very least,
the souvenirs of long readings, traces of
influence and the mark of the hand placed
an instant on the shoulder. To whoever
has traveled much among books and ideas,

JULES RENARD

this task is simple Plough and often easy
to the point that it is necessary rather to
refrain from it, not to vex the ingenious
arrangement of acquired originalities. I
have not had this scruple with Renard, but
have wished to draw a sketch book; but
the odd animal is shown alone, and the
leaves only contain, among the arabesques,
empty medallions.

To be begotten quite alone, to owe his
mind only to himself, to write (since it is a
question of writing) with the certitude of
achieving the true new wine, of an unex-
pected, original and inimitable flavor, that
is what must be, to the author of VEcorni-
fleur a legitimate motive of joy and a very
weighty reason for being less troubled than
others about posthumous reputation. Al-
ready, his Poil-de-Carotte, that so curious
type of the intelligent, artful, fatalistic
child, has entered into the very form of
speech. The 'Toil-de-Carotte, you must
shut the hens in each evening" equals the
most famous words of the celebrated como-
dies.in burlesque truth, and he is at once

zzx

JULES RENARD

Cyrano and Moliere and will not be robbed
of this claim.

Originality being undeniably established,
other merits of Jules Renard are distinct-
ness, precision, freshness; his pictures of
life, Parisian or rural, have the appearance
of dry-point work, occasionally a little thin,
but well circumscribed, clear and alive.
Certain fragments, more shaded off and
ample, are marvels of art, as for instance^
Une Famille d'Arbres.

*'It is after having traversed a sun-
parched plain that I meet them.

"Because of the noise, they do not stand
by the road's edge. They inhabit the un-
ploughed fields, near a fountain^ like lone
birds.

'Trom afar they seem inscrutable. When
I approach, their trunks relax. They dis-
creetly welcome me. I can repose and re-
fresh myself, but I divine that they observe
and mistrust me.

'They live together, the oldest in the
center, and the) little ones, whose first leaves

112

JULES RENARD

have just appeared, almost everywhere,
without ever dispersing.

*'They take long to die, and they protect
the standing dead until they fall to dust.

'They caress each other with their long
branches to be assured that they are all
there, like the blind. They gesticulate
with rage, if the wind puts itself out of
breath trying to uproot them. But among
themselves, no dispute. They only mur-
mur agreement,

^ "I feel that they should be my real family.
I will forget the other. These trees by de-
grees will adopt me, and to merit this, I
understand what must be known.

''Already I know how to gaze at passing
clouds.

"I know, too, how to rest in a spot.

*'Anc]\ I almost know how to be silent."

When the anthologies will hail this page,
they will hardly have an irony so fine and a
poetry so true.

LOUIS DUMUR

LOUIS DUMUR.

TO be the representative of logic among
an assembly of poets is a difficult
role and has its inconveniences.
There is the risk of being taken too seri-
ously and consequently of feeling bound to
treat literature in grave tones. Gravity is
not necessary for the expression of what we
believe is truth ; irony agreeably seasons the
moral decoction; pepper is needed in this
camomile. Scornfully to affirm is a sure
enough way of not being the dupe of even
one's own affirmations. This is practicable
in literature, for here all is uncertain and
art itself doubtless is but a game where we
philosophically deceive each other. That is
why it is good to smile.

Louis Dumur rarely smiles. But if, hav-
ing now gained more indulgence and some
rights to real bitterness, he wished to smile
so as to excuse and amuse himself, it seems

117

LOUIS DUMUR

that the whole assembly of poets would
protest, astonished and perhaps scandalized.
So, by habit and logic, he remains grave.

He is logic itself. He can observe, com-
bine, deduce; his novels, dramas, poems are
of a solid construction whose balanced
architecture delights by the skillful sym-
metry of curves, everything directed to-
wards a central dome whither the eye is
severely drawn. He is clever and strong
enough, when charmed with error, not to
abandon it except after having driven it to
a comer, with its extremest ccwisequences,
and sufficiently master of himself not to
confess his error, but even to defend it with
all the ingenuities of argument. Such is
his system of French verse based on tonic
accent; it is true that the result, often de-
ficient, for langu^^es themselves have a
quite imperious logic, was occasionally
felicitous and unexpected, with hexameters
like this.

L'oigueilleiise paresse des miits, des parfiims et
dessems.

(TIL»)

1x8

LOUIS DUMXJR

It is towards the theater that Dumur
seems definitely to have turned his intel-
lectual activity. The first pages of his
plays cut (I do not speak of Rembrandt, a
purely dramatic history, in the grand style
and with vast unfolding), and one is sur-
prised by a renovated setting, retouched
words, and a light of conventional realism,
an arrangement of things and beings under
a new cloak and fresh varnish, — but as we
go on, the author affirms that in this sad
scenic landscape, valid speech will be heard
and that a puff of wind turning to tempest
wUl ruin the planting.

The screen, with its new cloth, is so
arranged that, its banality destroyed by
degrees, beings and things stripped by a.
caprice of lightning, nothing is left standing
but the idea, naked or veiled in its sole,
essential mysteriousness.

This old-new setting, then, is the simplest
and most available, where the neutral im-
agination of a throng of eyewitnesses can,
with the least effort, place a mental combat
whose arms are the accessories of the theater.

119

LOUIS DUMUR

A man journeys through the world bear-
ing with him a coffer that contains free
natal earth; he carries his love. But a day
falls when he is crushed by his love. In
the hour of this catastrophe, another man
understands, he takes from him the woman
who is breaking his arms. To love is to
saddle oneself withr an imperious burden up
to the very moment when, ceasing to be
free, one ceases to be strong. La Motte de
terre explains this lucidly and forcefully.
It is the work of a writer thoroughly master
of his natural gifts, shaping them with an
ease and that air of domination which easily
subdues ideas. It happens that a work
may be superior to the man and to his very
intelligence, but by very little. Though it
be little and an innocent untruth, it is a
humiliating spectacle and provokes scorn
more than the written avowal of the most
frightful and complete mediocrity in the
brain that gave it birth. The man of
worth is always superior to his creation, for
his desire is too vast ever to be filled, his
love too miraculous ever to be met.

J20

LOUIS DUMUR

La Nebuleuse is a poem of lovely and
deep perspective, where, symbolized by art-
less beings, are seen the successive genera-
tions of men following each other uncom-
prehendingly, almost undiscemingly, so dif-
ferent are their souls, and always summed
up, to the moment of their decline, by the
child, the future, the "nebula," whose birth,
finally confirmed, brings death, under its
morning clearness, to the faded smiles of the
aged stars. And, the vision ended, it is
urged that this morrow, which is becoming
today, will be altogether like its dead
brothers, and that in short there is nothing
new in the spectacle which amuses the dead
years leaning

Sur les balcons du del en robes surann^es.

But this "nothingness" has no import-
ance for the human atoms that form and
determine it; it is the delightful newness
that we breathe and of which we live. The
new ! The new ! And let each intelligence,
though short-lived, affirm his will to exist,
and to be dissimilar to all antecedent or

I2Z

LOUIS DUMUR

surrounding manifestations, and let each
nebula aspire to the character of a star
whose light shall be distinct and clear
among other lights.

All this I have read in the text and in the
silences of the dialogue, for when the work
of art is the development of an idea, the
very spaces between lines answer whoever
can question them. . ^

Dumur is disposed to create a philosophi-
cal theater, a theater of ideas, and also to
renew the toman A theses for Pauline au la
LiberU de Vamour is a serious work, ar-
ranged with skill, thought out in an original
manner and implying a rare intellectual
worth.

GEORGES EEKHOUD

THERE are few dramatists among the
newcomers, I mean fervent observ-
ers of the human drama, endowed
with that large sympathy which urges the
writer to fraternize with all modes and forms
of life. To some the people's actions seem
unimportant, perhaps because they lack that
spirit of philosophic generalization which
elevates the humblest happenings to the
height of a tragedy. Others have and con-
fess the tendency to simplify everything.
They observe and compare facts only to
extract summaries and quintessences from
them ; they have qualms and shame at
narrating the mechanisms so often described :
they set up soul portraits, keeping of physical
anatomy only the materiality necessary to
hold the play of colors. Such an art, beside
having the disadvantage of being disliked
by the reading public (which desires that it
be told stories, and which demands it of the

GEORGES EEKHOUD

newcomer) is the sign of an evident and too
disdainful absence of passion. But the
dramatist is an impassioned being, a mad
lover of life and of the present life, not the
things of yesterday, dead representations
whose faded decorations are recognizable in
lead coffins, but beings of today with all
their beauty and animal grossness, their
mysterious souls, their true blood that will
flow from a heart and not from a swollen
bladder, if stabbed in the fifth act.

Georges Eekhoud is a dramatist, a pas-
sionate soul, a quaffer of life and of blood.

His sympathies are multifarious and di-
wrse; he loves everything. ''Nourish thy-
self with all that has life." Obeying the
biblical word, he gathers strength from all
the repasts the world offers him, he assim-
ilates the tender or the harsh wildness of
peasants or sailors with as much sureness as
the most deliberate and hypocritical psy-
chology of creatures drunk with civilization,
the disquieting infamy of eccentric loves and
the nobility of consecrated passions, the
brutal sport of clumsy popular customs and

GEORGES EEKHOUD

the delicate perversion of certain adolescent
souls. He makes no choice, but understands
everything because he loves everything.

Nevertheless, whether voluntarily or
whether fixed to the natal soil by social
necessities, he has limited the field of his
fantastic pursuits to the very limits of old
Flanders. This agrees marvelously with his
genius, which is Flemish, excessive in his
sentimental raptures as in his debauches,
PhiUippe de Champaigne or Jordaens, draw-
ing out lean faces dramatized by the eyes of
the fixed idea or displaying all the red
irruptions of joyous flesh. Eekhoud, then,
is a representative writer of a race, or of a
moment of this race. This is important to
assure permanence to a work, and a place
in the literary histories.

Cycle patHndaire and Mes communions
seem the two books of Eekhoud where this
impassioned man cries his charities, angers,
compassions, scorns and loves most clearly
and loudly, he himself the third book of that
marvelous trilogy whose two first have for
title, Maeterlinck and Verhaeren.

127

GEORGES EEKHOUD

Playing a little on the word, I have called
him "dramatist," in defiance of the etymol-
ogies and usages, although he has never
written for the theater; but we divine a
genius essentially dramatic by the way in
which his narratives are planned and as
though miraculously balanced to the sudden
changes, the return to their true nature of
characters maddened by passion.

He has the genius for sudden changes.
A character : then life presses down and the
character bends; a new weight straightens
and sets him up according to his original
truth. It is the very essence of psycho-
logical drama, and if the setting shares in
the human modifications, the work assumes
an air of finality and plenitude, giving an
impression of unforseen art by the accepted
logic of natural simplicities. This might be
a system of composition (not however
deficient), but not here: the whisperings of
the instinct are hearkened to and welcomed ;
the necessity of the catastrophe is thrust
upon this lucid mind (who has not dulled
his mirror by breathing upon it), and he

128

GEORGES EEKHOUD

clearly relates the consequences of the
seismic movement of the human soul.
There are good examples of this art in the
tales of Balzac: £/ Verdugo is only a suc-
cession of sudden changes, but too concise:
Eekhoud's le Coq Rouge, just as dramatic,
has a much deeper analysis and then is
unveiled with grandeur, like a lovely land-
scape' effortlessly transformed by the play
of clouds and the luminous space.

Equally grand, though with a cruel
beauty, is the tragic story simply called
Une mauvaise rencontre where is seen the
heroic transfiguration of the piteous soul of
a weak vagrcint, overpowered by the strength
of a gesture of love and, under the imperious
magnetism of the word, blossomed martyr,
a stream of pure blood rushing miraculously
from the putrefied veins of the social carrion.
Later on Mauxgraves enjoys and dies of
the terror of having beheld his words realized
to their very supreme convulsion, and the
red cravat of the predestined become the
steel garrote which cuts the white neck in
two.

129

GEORGES EEKHOUD

In a novel of Balzac is a rapid, confused
episode, which will recall this tragedy to
genealc^ists of ideas. Through hatred of
humanity, M. de Grandville has given a
note for a thousand francs to a ragpicker,
so as to turn him into a drunkard, an idler,
a thief; when he returns to his home, he
learns that his natural son has just been
arrested for theft; it is only romantic. This
same anecdote, minus the conclusion, is
found in A Rebours where des Esseintes
acts, but on a young blackguard, nearly like
M. de Grandville and through a motive of
malignant scepticism. Here is a possible
tree of Jesse, but which I declare unauthen-
tic, for the tr^^ic perversity of Eekhoud,
chimera or screech-owl, is an original and
sincere monster.

If sincerity is a merit, it is doubtless not an
absolute literary merit. Art is well pleased
with falsehood and no one is particular to
confess either his "communions" or his
repulsions; but by sincerity I here imder-
stand the artistic disinterestedness which
acts so that the writer, imaf raid of terrifying
130

GEORGES EEKHOUD

the average brain or of vexing certain
friends or masters, disrobes his thought
with the calm wantonness of the extreme
innocence of perfect vice — or of passion.
Eekhoud's ''communions'' are impassioned;
he es^erly sits down to table and having
nourished himself on charity, anger, pity
and scorn, having tasted all the love elixirs
piously formed by his hate, he rises, drunks
but not fed, with the future joys.

131

PAUL ADAM

THE author of Mystere des Fotdes
strongly recalls Balzac; he has his
power and dispersive force. Like
Balzac, but to a much smaller extent, he
wrote, while very young, execrable books
where no one could have forseen the future
genius of an intelligence truly cyclical; la
Force du mal is no more in the germ in le
TM chez Miranda than le Pere Goriot in
Jane la Pdle or U Vicaire des Ardennes.
Paul Adam, nevertheless, is a precocious
I>erson, but there are limits to precocity
especially in a writer destined to narrate
life exactly as he sees and feels it. It was
needful that the education of the senses
should have had time to mature and that
experience should have fortified the mind in
the art of comparisons and choice, the asso-
ciation and disassociation of ideas. A nov-
elist still needs a large erudition and all
kinds of ideas that are solidly acquired, but

I3S

PAUL ADAM

slowly and by chance, by the good will of
things and the favorableness of events.

Today Paul Adam is in all his radiance and
on the very eve of glory. Each of his ges-
tures, each pace of his brings him nearer to
the bomb-ketch ready to explode, and if he
withstands the qualing from the thunder-
clap, he will be king and master. By this
bomb-ketch, I do not mean the great mob,
but that large public, already selected,
which, insensible to pure art, nevertheless
demands that its romantic emotions be
served enrobed in true literary style, original,
strongly perfumed, of long dough cleverly
kneaded, and in a form new enough to
surprise and charm. This was Balzac's
public; it is the public which Paul Adam
seems on the point of reconquering. The
novel of maimers (I omit three or four
masters whom I have not to judge here) is
fallen lower than ever since the century and
a half when it was brought from England.
Neglecting observation, style, imagination
and especially ideas, which were rather
general than particular, the fictionists who

136

PAUL ADAM

took up the trade of telling stories, have
brought fiction to such a point of disrepute
that an intelligent man, mindful of employ-
ing his leisure in a manner worthy of his
intelligence, no longer dares open one of
these books, which even the quay book-
stalls rebel against and dam up against the
yellow current. Paul Adam certainly has
suffered through this convulsion of scorn:
the lettered men and women, badly in-
formed, have long supposed that his books
were like all the rest. They are different.

First by style: Paul Adam uses a lang-
uage that is vigorous, concise, full of images;
new to the point of inaugurating syntactic
forms. By observation: his keen glance
pierces like a wasp sting through things and
souls; like the new photography, he reads
through skins and caskets. By the imagin-
ation, which permits him to evoke and vivify
the most diverse, chsiracteristic and personal
beings, he has, like Balzac, the genius not
only of giving life to his characters, but
personality, of making them true individ-
uals, all well-endowed with an individual

PAUL ADAM

soul: in la Force du Mai, a young girl is
placed so sharply under our eyes that she
becomes unforgettable; her character, un-
fortunately, too abruptly summed up,
wavers at the end. By fecundity, finally:
fecundity not only linear and of the nature
of cleared fields, but of works whose slightest
are still works.

He has undertaken two great romantic
epopees which his ardent bold spirit will
perfect to the condition of monuments,
VEpoque and les VokmUs merveiUeiises. He
works alone, like a swarm, and at the first
ray of sunshine, the bee ideas rush tumul-
tously forth and disperse across the vast
fields of life.

Paul Adam is a magnifident spectacle.

138

LAUTRfiAMONT

• *

LAUTRfiAMONT

HE was a young man of savage and
unexpected originality, a diseased
genius and, quite frankly, a mad
genius. Imbeciles grow insane and in their
insanity the imbecility remains stagnant or
agitated; in the madness of a man of genius
some genius often remains: the form and
not the quality of the intelligence has been
affected; the fruit has been bruised in the
fall, but has preserved all its perfume and
all the savor of its pulp, hardly too ripe.

Such was the adventure of the amazing
stranger, self-adorned with this romantic
pseudonym: Comte de Lautr&tmont. He
was born at Montevideo in April, 1846, and
died at the age of twenty-eight, having
published the Chants de Maldoror and Pois-
ies, a collection of thoughts and critical
notes of a literature less exasperated and
even, here and there, too wise. We know
nothing of his brief life: he seems to have

141

LAUTREAMONT

had no literary connection, the numerous
friends apostrophized in his dedications
bearing names that have remained secrets.

The Chants de Maldoror is a long poem in
prose whose six first chants only were writ-
ten. It is probable that Lautr6amont,
though living, would not have continued
them. We feel, in proportion as we finish
the reading of the volume, that conscious-
ness is going, going — and when it returns
to him, several months before his death, he
composes the Poesies, where, among very
curious passages, is revealed the state of
mind of a dying man who repeats, while
disfiguring them in fever, his most distant
memories, that is to say, for this infant, the
teachings of his professors !

A motive the more why these chants
surprise. It was a magnificent, almost
inexplicable stroke of genius. Unique this
book will remain, and henceforth it remains
added to the list of works which, to the
exclusion of all classicism, forms the scanty
library and the sole literature admissible to
those minds, oddly amiss, that are denied

142

LAUTRfiAMONT

the joys, less rare, of common things and
conventional morality.

The worth of the Chants de Maldoror is
not in pure imagination: fierce, demoniac,
disordered or exasperated with arrogance in
crazy visions, it terrifies rather than charms ;
then, even in unconsciousness, there are
influences that can be determined. ^'O
Nights of Young," the author exclaims in
his verses, "what sleep you have cost me!"
And here and there he is swayed by the
romantic extravagances of such English fic-
tionists as were still r^d in his time, Anne
Radcliffe and Matur^in (whom Balzac
esteemed), Byron, also by the medical
reports on eroticism, and finally by the
bible. He certainly had read widely, and
the only author he never quotes, Flaubert,
must never have been far from his reach.

This worth I would like to make known,
consists, I believe, in the novelty and origin-
ality of the images and metaphors, by their
abundance, the sequence logically arranged
like a poem, as in the magnificent description
of a shipwreck, where all the verses (although

143

LAUTRfiAMONT

no typographic artifice betokens them) end
thus: 'The ship in distress fires cannon
shots of alarm; but it founders slowly . . .
majestically." So, too, the litanies of the
Ancient Ocean: "Ancient Ocean, your
waters are bitter. I greet you, Ancient
Ocean. Ancient Ocean, O great celibate,
when you course the solemn solitudes of
your phlegmatic realms ... I greet you.
Ancient Ocean." Here are other ims^es:
"like a comer, as far as the eye can reach,
where shivering cranes deliberate much, and
soar sturdily in winter athwart the sileace."
And this terrifying invocation: silk-eyed
octopus. To describe men he uses expres-
sions of a Homeric suggestiveness: narrow-
shouldered men, ugly-headed men, lousy-
haired men, the man with pupils of jasper,
red-shanked men. Others have a violence
magnificently obscene: "He returns to his
terrified attitude and continues to watch,
with a nervous trembling, the male hunt,
and the great lips of the vagina of gloom,
whence ceaselessly flow, like a river, im-
mense dark spermatazoae which take their
144

LAUTRfiAMONT

flight in the desolate ether, concealing
entire nature with the vast unfolding of
their bat wings, and the solitary legions of
octopuses, saturnine and doleful at watching
these hollow inexpressible fulgurations."
(1868: so that one cannot class them as
phrases fancied from some print of Odilon
Redon). But what a theme, on the other
hand, what a story for the master of retro-
grade forms, of fear and the amorphous
stirrings of beings that are near — and what
a book, written, we might say, to tempt him!

Here is a passage, at once quite charac-
teristic of Lautrfeimont's talent and of his
mental malady:

"With slow steps the brother of the blood-
sucker (Maldoror) marched through the
forest . . . Then he cried: 'Man, when you
come upon a dead dog, pressed against a
milldam so as to prevent it from issuing, go
not like the others, and take with your
hands the worms that flow from his swollen
belly, considering it with astonishment,
opening a knife, and then cutting a great
number of them from the body, as you

lautrEamont

repeat that you too will be no more than
this dog. What mystery seek you? Neither
I nor the four fins of the sea bear of the Nor-
thern Seas have succeeded in solving the
problem of life .... Who is this being,
near the horizon, that fearlessly approaches,
with troubled oblique boimds? And what
majesty blended with serene gentleness!
His gaze, though kind, is piercing. His
enormous eyelids play with the breeze and
appear alive. He is unknown to me. My
body trembles as he fixes his monstrous eyes
on me. Something like a dazzling aureole
of light plays around him . . . How fair
he is . • . You should be powerful, for you
have a form more than human, sad as the
universe, beautiful as suicide . . . Howi
... it is you, toad! . . . great toad . . .
unfortunate toad! . . . Pardon! . . . What
do you on this earth where are the accursed?
But what have you done with your viscous
fetid pustules to have such a sweet air? I
saw you when you descended from above,
poor toad! I was thinking of infinity, and
at the same time of my weakness . . . Since
146

LAUTRfiAMONT

then you have appeared to me monarch of
the ponds and marshes! Covered with a
glory which belongs only to God, you have
departed thence, leaving me consoled, but
my staggering reason founders before such
grandeur . • . Fold your white wings and
gaze not from on high with those troubled
eyes)." The toad rests on its hind legs
(which resemble those of a man) and, while
the slugs, woodles, and snails flee at the
sight of their mortal enemy, gives utterance
to those words: ''Hearken, Maldoror.
Notice my figure, calm as a mirror ... I
am but a simple dweller of the reeds, 'tis
true, but thanks to your own contact,
taking of good only what is in yourself, my
reason has grown and I can converse with
you ... As for myself, I should prefer to
have protruding eyes, my body lacking feet
and hands, to have killed a man, than to be
as you are. For I hate you! Adieu,
then, hope not to find again the toad in
your passage. You have been the cause of
my death. I leave for eternity, to implore
pardon for you."

147

LAUTRfiAMONT

Alienists, had they studied this book,
would have classified the author among
those aspiring to pass for persecuted persons :
in the world he only sees himself and God —
and God thwarts him. But we might also
inquire whether Lautreamont is not a
superior ironist, a man forced by a precious
scorn for mankind to feign a madness whose
incoherence is wiser and more beautiful than
the average reason. There is the madness
of pride; there is the delirium of medio-
crity. How many balanced and honest
pages, of good and clear literature, would I
not give for this, for these words and phrases
under which he seems to have wished to
inter reason herself! The following is taken
from the singular Poesies:

'The perturbations, anxieties, deprava-
tions, deaths, exceptions in the physical
or moral order, spirit. of negation, brutish-
ness, hallucinations fostered by the will,
torments, destruction, confusions, tears, in-
satiabilities, servitudes, delving imagina-
tions, novels, the unexpected, the forbidden,
the chemical singularities of the mysterious

148

LAUTRfiAMONT

vulture which lies in wait for the carrion
of some dead illusion, precocious and abor-
tive experiences, the darkness of the mailed
bug, the terrible monomania of pride, the
innoculation of deep stupor, funeral ora-
tions, desires,, betrayals, tyrannies, im-
pieties, irritations, acrimonies, aggressive
insults, madness, temper, reasoned terrors,
strange inquietudes which the reader would
prefer not to experience, cants, nervous
disorders, bleeding ordeals that drive logic
at bay, exaggerations, the absence of sin-
cerity, bores, platitudes, the somber, the
lugubrious, childbirths worse than murders,
passions, romancers at the Courts of Assize,
tragedies, • odes, melodramas, extremes for-
ever presented, reason hissed at with im-
pimity, odor of hens steeped in water,
nausea, frogs, devil-fish, sharks, simoom of
the deserts, that which is somnambulistic,
squint-eyed, nocturnal, sonmiferous, noc-
tambulistic, viscous, equivocal, consump-
tive, spasmodic, aphrodisiac, anaemic, one-
eyed, hermaphroditic, bastard, albino, pe-
deraste, phenomena of the aquarium and the
bearded woman, hours surfeited with

149

LAUTRfiAMONT

gloomy discouragement, fantasies, acri-
monies, monsters, demoralizing syllogisms,
ordure, that which does not think like a
child, desolation, the intellectual manchineel
trees, perfumed cankers, stalks of the ca-
melias, the guilt of a writer rolling down the
slope of nothingness and scorning himself
with joyous cries, remorse, hypocrisies,
vague vistas that grind one in their im-
perceptible gearing, the serious spittles on
inviolate maxims, vermin and their insinuat-
ing titillations, stupid prefaces like those of
Cromwell, Mademoiselle de Maupin and
Dumas filsy decaying, helplessness, blas-
phemies, suffocation, stifling, mania, — be-
fore these unclean chamel houses, which I
blush to name, it is at last time to react
against whatever disgusts us and bows us
down." Maldoror (or Lautreamont) seems
to have judged himself in making himself
apostrophised thus by his enigmatic Toad:
"Your spirit is so diseased that it perceives
nothing; and you deem it natural each
time there issues from your mouth words
that are senseless, though full of an infernal
grandeur."
150

TRISTAN CORBlfiRE

TRISTAN CORBIfiRE

LAFORGE, in the course of a reading,
sketched some notes regarding Cor-
bi^re which, though not printed, are
nevertheless definitive, as for instance:

"Bohemian of the Ocean — picaresque
and tramp — breaking down, concise, driv-
ing his verse with a whip — strident as the
cry of gulls, and like them never wearied —
without aestheticism — nothing of poetry
or verse, hardly of literature — sensual, he
never reveals the flesh — a blackguard and
Byronic creature — alway the crisp word
— there is not another artist in verse more
freed of poetic language — he has a trade
without plastic interest — the interest, the
effect is in the whip stroke, the dry-point,
the pun, the friskiness, the romantic abrupt-
ness — he wishes to be indefinable, un-
cataloguable, to be neither loved nor hated;

IS3

TRISTAN CX)RBlfiRE

in short, declassed from every latitude,
every custom hither and beyond the Pyre-
nees."

This doubtless is the truth: Corbiere all
his life was dominated and led by the
demon of contradiction. He supposed that
one must be differentiated from men by
thoughts and acts exactly contrary to the
thoughts and acts of the mass of men;
there is much of the willful in his originality;
he labored at it as women labor over their
complexion during long afternoons between
sky and earth, and when he disembarked,
it was to draw broadsides of stupefaction*
Dandyism a la Baudelaire.

But a nature cannot be developed except
in the sense of its instincts and inclinations.
Corbi^e had inherently to be something of
what he became, the Don Juan of singu-
larity; it is the only woman he loves; he
mocks the other with the clever phrase "the
etema madame."

Corbi^e has much wit, wit at the same
time of the Montmartre wine-shop and of
the blade of past times. His talent is

IS4

TRISTAN CX)RBI£RE

formed of the braggart spirit, uncouth and
humbug, of a bad impudent taste, of genius
thrusts. He has the dnmken air, but he is
only laboriously clumsy; to make absurd
chaplets, he shapes from miraculous, rolled
pebbles works of a secular patience, but in
the dizaine he leaves the little stone of the
sea quite naked and rough, because at bot-
tom he loves the sea with a great naivete
and because his folly for paradoxical things
gives way, from time to time, to an intoxi-
cation of poetry and beauty.

Among the never wdinary verses of
Amours jaunes, are many that are admir-
able, but admiraUe with an air so equivocal,
so specious, that we do not always enjoy
them at the first meeting; then we judge
that Tristan Corbi^re is, like Laforgue, a
little his disciple, one of those undeniable,
unclassable talents which are strange and
precious exceptions in the history of litera-
ture — singular even in a gallery of oddities.

Here are two little poems of Tristan
Corbife"e, forgotten even by the last pub-
lisher of the Affwurs jaunes:

TRISTAN LX)KBI£RE

PARIS NOCTURNE

Cert la mer; — cafaneidat. — £t la grande marfe
Avec un grondement lointam s'est ietii6e . . •
Le dot va levenir se loulant dans son faniit.
Entendez-vous gratter les oabes de la nidt.

Cert le Styx ass6ch6: le chiffonier Diogfene,
La lanteine k la main, s'en vient avec sans-gtee.
Le kH^ du ruisseau noir, les pontes perveis
Ptehent: leur cr&ne creuz leur sert de Ix^te k veats.

Cert le chanq>: pour glaner les impuies cbaipies
S'abat le vol tournant des hideuses haipies;
Le lapin de goutti^, k VaStt des longeuiSy
Fuit les fils de Bcxidy, nocturnes vendangeurs.

Cert la mort: la police git. — En haut I'amour
Fait sa sieste, en tetant la viande d'un bras lourd
(M le baiser eteint laisse sa plaque rouge.
Llieure ert seule. £coutez. Pas un r£ve ne booge.

Cest la vie: 6coutez, la source vive chante

L'^temelle chanson sur la t^te gluante

D'un dieu marin tirant ses membres nus et verts

Sur le Mt de la Morgue . • • et les yeux grands ouverts.

XS6

TRISTAN CORBlfiRE

PARIS DIURNE

Vois aiix cieux le grand rond de cuivre rouge luirei
Immense casserole ojl le bon Dieu fait cuire
La manne, I'arlequin, l'6temel plat du jotir.
C'est tremp£ de suetir et c'est tremp6 d'amour.

Les laridons en cercle attendent pr^ du four,
On entend vaguement la chair ranee bruire,
£t les soifEards aussi sont 1^, tendant leur buirey
Les marmiteux grelotte en attendant scm tour.

Crois-tu que le soleil frit done pour tout le monde
Ces gras graillons grouillants qu'im torrent d'or inonde?
Non, le bouillon de chien tombe sur nous du del.

Eux sont sous le rayon et nous sous la goutti^re.
A nous le pot au noir qui froidit sans lumi^re.
Notre substance a nous, c'est notre poche k fiel.

(TR. 41)

Bom at Morlaix in 1845, Tristan returned
there in 1875 to die of inflammation of the
lungs. He was the son (others say the
nephew) of the sea romancer, Edouard
Corbidre, author of Nigrier, whose violent
love for the things of the sea had such a
strong influence upon the poet. This Ni-

157

TRISTAN (X)RBI£RE

grier^ by Edouard G>rbi6re, captain on a
long-voy^e vessel, 1832, 2 vol. in-8, is a
quite interesting tale of maritime adven-
tures. The fourth chapter of the first
part, entitled Prisons d' Angleterre, (the
convict ships) contains the most curious de-
tails about the habits of the prisoners,
about the loves of the corvettes with the
^Jorts-a-braSf^ — in one place, the author
says, where "there was only one sex." The
preface of this novel reveals a spirit that is
very proud and very disdainful of the pub-
lic: the same spirit with some talent and a
sharper nervousness, — you have Tristan
G>rbi&*e*

is8

ARTHUR RIMBAUD

JEAN NICOLAS ARTHUR RIM-
BAUD was bom at Charleville, Oc-
tober 20, 1854, and from the most
tender age showed traits of the most insup-
portable blackguardism. His brief stay in
Paris was in 1870-71. He followed Ver-
laine in England, then in Belgium. After
the little misunderstanding which separated
them, Rimbaud roved through the world,
followed the most diverse trades, a soldier
in the army of Holland, ticket taker at
Stockholm in the Loisset circus, contractor
in the Isle of Cyprus, trader at Harrar, then
at Cape Guardafui, in Africa, where a friend
of M. Vittorio Pico saw him, applying him-
self to the fur trade. It is likely that, scorn-
ing all that lacks brutal gratification, savage
adventure, the violent life, this poet, singu-
lar among all, willingly renounced poetry.
None of the authentic pieces of Reliqtuiire
seem more recent than 1873; although he

i6i

ARTHUR RIMBAUD

did not die before the end of 1891. The
verses of his extreme youth are weak, but
from the age of seventeen Rimbaud ac-
quired originality, and his work will en-
dure, at least by virtue of phenomena. He
is often obscure, bizarre and absurd. Q'
sincerity nothing, with a woman's charao
ter, a girl's, inherently wicked and even
sav^e, Rimbaud has that kind of talent
which interests without pleasing. In his
works are pages which give the impression
of beauty one feels before a pustulous toad,
a good-looking syphillitic woman, or tke
Chateau-Rouge at eleven o'clock in the
evening. Les Pauvres a V^gUse^ les Prem-
ieres Communions possess an uncommon
quality of infamy and blasphemy. Les
Assis and le Bateau ivre, — there we have
the excellent Rimbaud, and I detest neither
Oraison du soir nor les Chercheuses de Paux.
He was somebody after all, since genius
enrkobles even baseness. He was a poet.
Some verses of his have remained living
almost in the state of ordinary speech:

Avec l'as8«ntiment des grands heliotropes.
162 CTft. ii)

ARTHUR RIMBAUD

Some stanzas of Bateau ivre belong to true
and great poetry:

£t dte lors je me suis baign6 dans le po^e
De la mer, infus6 d'astres et latescent,
D^vorant les azurs verts od, flottaison bI6me
£t ravie, un noy6 pensif parfois descend,
Oiiy tdgnant tout I, coup les bleuitfe, d^Iires
Et lythmes lents sous les rutilements du jour.
Plus fortes que I'alcool, plus vastes que vos lyres,
Fermentent les rousseurs amires de I'amour.

(TR. 43)

The whole poem marches: all of Rim-
baud's poems march, and in les lUumina"
turns there are marvelous belly dances.

It is a pity that his life, so poorly known,
was not the true vita abscondita; what is
known disgusts from what can be under-
stood of it. Rimbaud was like those women
whom we are not surprised to learn have
taken to religion in some house of shame;
but what revolts still more is that he seems
to have been a jealous and passionate mis-
tress: here the aberration becomes de-
bauched, being sentimental. Senancour,
the man who has spoken most freely of love,
says of these inharmonious liaisons where

163

ARTHUR RIMBAUD

the female falls so low that she has no name
except in the dirtiest slang:

"When in a very particular situation, the
need results in a minute of misconduct, ' we
can perhaps pardon men totally vulgar, or at
least banish its memory; but how under-
stand that which becomes a habit, an at-
tachment? The fault may have been acci-
dental; but that which is joined to this act
of brutality, that which is not unforseen,
becomes ignoble. If even a passion capable
of troubling the head and almost of depriving
one of liberty, has often left an ineffaceable
stain, what disgust will not a consent given
in cold-blood inspire? Intimacy in this
manner, that is the height of shame, the
irremediable infamy."

But the intelligence, conscious or uncon-
scious, though not having all rights, has the
right of all absolutions.

• • • Qui sait si le genie
N'est pas une de vos vertus,

CTr. 44)

monsters, whether you are called Rimbaud,
— or Verlaine?
164

FRANCIS POICTEVIN

LIKE all writers who have achieved an
. understanding of life, Francis Poicte-
vih, though a bom novelist, promptly
renounced the novel. He knows that every-
thing happens, that a fact in itself is not
more interesting than another fact and that
the manners of expression alone have sig-
nificance.

^ I recall something to this effect reported
by Sarcey apropos of the lamentable Mur-
ger: "About gave him a"subject few a novel ;
he made nothing of it. He was decidedly a
sluggard." It is very difficult to persuade
certain old men — old or young — that
there are no subjects; there is only a subject
in literature, and that he who writes, and
all literature, that is to say all philosophy,
can arise equally from the cry of a run-over

167

FRANCIS POICTEVIN

dog as from Faust's exclamations as he
questions Nature: "Where seize thee, O in-
finite Nature? And thou. Breasts?"

The author of Tatd Bos and of PresguCy
like any other person, could have arranged
his meditations in dialogues, order his senti-
ments into chapters divided at random, in-
sinuate through pseudo-living characters a
bit of gesticulating life and have them ex-
press, by the act of kneeling on the flag-
stones of some familiar church, the virtue
of an unrecognized creed: in short, write
"the novel of mysticism" and popularize the
practice of mental prayer for the "literary
journals." By this means his books would
have gained him a popularity which cer-
tainly he now lacks, for few writers among
those whose talent is evident are so little
esteemed, less known and less discussed.
Poictevin disdains all artifice save the
artifice of style, a snare into which we are
content to fall. Whether he notes the
delicacies of a flower, a little girl's attitude,
the grace of a madonna, or the cold and
quite hard purity of Catherine de Genes, he
i68

FRANCIS POICTEVIN

wins us with sure strokes, by that very
preciosity with which some clumsily re-
proach him. This preciosity is rigwously
personal. Apart from all groups, as remote
from Huysmans as from Mallarmet the
author of Tout Bas works, one would say,
in a cell, an ideal cell he carries with him
while traveling; and there, standing, often
kneeling, he pours out his poems and
prayers in phrases that have the unique
musical quality of a Byzantine organ. Less
phrases than vibrations, vibrations so pe-
culiar that few souls find themselves at-
tuned. Music of Gregorian plain-chant,
such as one listens to in a sumptuous
Flemish church, with sudden fugues of ex-
alted prayer that soar aloft towards the high
lines and hurl themselves against the painted
vaults, kindling old stained-glass windows,
illuming the lines of the darkened cross with
love. The mystic monk, the true mystic,
Fra Angelico, and Bonaventura a little, live
again in the pages of Presque with its chato-
yant spirituality, more than in all the
pseudo-mystic literature of our time. Would

169

FRANCIS POICTEVIN

not the author of Record4ite sandae cruets
find more satisfaction in this i»^yer than
in the patronizing and fructiferous deduc-
tions; "Here below the Christ appears the
most adorable, most absorbed figure of the
eternal substance, scented with all virtues;
a figure with dulcet blues, the burning clear
yellows of topaz or chrysanthemum, the
blood-red hues of future glories. iGid de-
spite my daily relapses, I compel myself,
according to Jesus' word to the Samaritan,
to adoration in spirit and in truth/' Poicte-
vin has entered the ''Garden of all the
flowerings" of which Saint Bonaventura
sang.

(Cniz ddidarom hortus
In quo floient omnia • • •)

muo)

and kneeling, he has kissed the heart of
roses whose rosary is of blood, — the blood
of the great torment. While Morning,
fair-haired youth, delivers moist adoles^
cence to folly-driven women, he goes to-
wards a priestly peace, to masses of solitude,
170

FRANCIS POICTEVIN

and one of the graces gathered is that his
soul becomes impregnated with the "in-
terior light, claritas caritas.'"

It is the essential point. Mere phrases,
yes; but the phrases are no more than the
attire, and reserve of his art. He has felt,
dreamed or thought before speaking; es-
pecially has he loved: and some of his
metaphors leap like a fervent prayer, like
one of the cries of Saint Theresa.

He strives clearly to reach the bottom,
to penetrate even the vital center of the
hoftensia's umbel. Everywhere he seeks —
and finds — the soul. No one is less a
Aetorician than this stylist, for the rhetori-
cian is he who clothes the solid common
things with garments fit to sustain all the
vulgarity of bedizenings, while Poictevin
ever diaphanizes a phantom, a rainbow, an
illusion, an azalea flower, thus: "Would a
hand of a consumptive in the contraction of
its quasi-diaphaneity, leaning, not lazily,
but which no longer is conscious, seem to
warn, less exalted than before and indul*
gently returned?"

X71

FRANCIS POICTEVIN

Yes, how subtle it is! — and why not
write "like everybody"?

Alas ! that is forbidden him, — because he
is a mystic, because he feels new rapports
between man and God, and because, veiled
in the dolorous perfection erf a form where
grace becomes pearled in minutiae, Poicte-
vin is a spontaneous writer. How many
things, doubtless, has he never transcribed,
afraid of not having discovered the exact
expression, the imique and very rare, the
unedited!

Everything, indeed, in a work of art
should be unedited, — and even the words,
by the manner of grouping them, of shaping
them to new meanings, — and one often
regrets having an alphabet familiar to too
many half-lettered persons.

Disciple of Goncourt, from whom he
further sharpened his precious style of
writing, Francis Poictevin by degrees re-
fined himself to immateriality. And that
isf just his genius, the expression of the im-
material and the inexpressible: he invented
the mysticism of style,

X72

ANDRfi GIDE

ANDRE GIDE

IN 1891 I wrote as follows apropos of the
Cahiers d'Andri Walter, an anony-
mous work: "The diary is a form of
good literature and perhaps the best for
some extremely subjective minds* De
Maupassant would make nothing of it.
For him the world is like the cover of a bil-
liard table; he notes the meetings of the
balls and stops when the balls stop, for if
there is no further material movement to be
perceived, there is nothing more to be said,
llie subjective soul feeds on itself through
the reserve of its stored sensations; and, by
an occult chemistry, by unconscious combi-
nations whose numbers approach infinity,
those sensations, often of a faraway past
time, become changed and are multiplied
in ideas. Then are narrated, not anecdotes,
but the very aoecdotes_.of„<Oiiefiel£,-^the-^irfy
kind that can often be retold, if one has the

I7S

amdr£ gide

talent and gift to vary their appearances.
In this way has the author of these copy
books worked and thus will he work
again. His is a romantic and philosophic
mind, of the lines^e of Goethe. One of
these years, when he will have recognized
the helplessness of thought gainst the on-
ward course of things, its social uselessness,
the scorn it inspires in that mass of cor-
puscles named society, indignation will
seize him, and since action, though illusive,
is forever closed to him, he will wake armed
with irony. This oddly enough, is a
'writer's finishing touch; it is the co-efficient
of his soul's worth. The theory of . the
novel, stated in a note of page 120 is of
more than mediocre interest; we must hope
that the author upon occasion will recollect
it. As for the present book, it is ingenuous
and delicate, the revealer of a fine intelli-
gence. It seems the condensation of a
whole youth of study, dreams and senti-
ment, of a tortuous, timorous youth. This
reflection (p. 142) rather well sums up
Andre Walter's state of mind: *0, the emo^
176

ANDRfi GIDE

tion when one is quite near to happiness,
when one has but to touch it, — and passes
on.

There is a certain pleasure in not having
been deceived in one's first judgment of the
first book of an unknown person. Now
that Andre Gide has, after several intelli-
gent works, become one of the most lumi-
nous of the Church's Levites, with the
flames of intelligence and grace quite visible
around his brow and in his eyes, the time
nears when bold discoverers will discuss his
genius, and, since he fares forth and ad-
vances, sound the trumpets of the advanc-
ing column. He deserves the glory, if any-
one merits it (glory is always unjust) since
to the originality of talent the master of
minds willed that in this singular being
should be joined ai^originality of soul. It
is a gift rare enough to justify speaking of it.

A writer's talent is often nothing but the
terrible faculty of retelling, in phrases that
seem beautiful, the eternal clamors of
mediocre humanity. Even gigantic gen-
iuses, like Victor Hugo or Adam de Saint-

177

ANDRfi GIDE

Victor were destined to utter an admirable
music whose grandeur consists in concealing
the immense emptiness of the deserts: their
soul is like the formless docile soul of deserts
and crowds; they love, think, and desire
the loves, thoughts, desires of all men and
of all beasts; poets, they magnificently de-
claim what is not worth the trouble of being
thought.

The human species, doubtless, in its
entire aspect of a hive or colony, is only
superior to the bison species or the king-
fisher, because we are a part of it; here and
there man is a sorry automaton; but his
superiority lies in his ability to attain con-
sciousness; a small number reach this stage.
To acquire the full consciousness of self is to
know oneself so different from others that
one no longer feels allied with men except
by purely animal contacts: nevertheless,
among souls of this degree, there is an ideal
fraternity based on differences, — while
social fraternity is based on resemblances.

The full consciousness of self can be called
originality of soulj^-^^and all this is said

178 ^

andr£ gide

only to point out the group of rare beings
to which Andre Gide belongs.

The misfortune of these beings, when
they wish to express themselves, is that
they do it with such odd gestures that men
fear to approach them; their life of social
contacts must often revolve in the brief
circle of ideal fraternities; or, when the mob
consents to admit such souls, it is as curi-
osities or museum objects. Their glory is,
finally, to be loved from afar and almost
understood, as parchments are seen and
read above sealed glass cases.

But all this is related in PaludeSy a story,
as is known, "of animals living in dusky
caverns, and which lose their sight through
never being used"; it is also, with a more
intimate charm than in the Voyage d'
Urietij the ingenuous story of a very com-
plicated, very intellectual and very original
soul.

179

PIERRE LOUYS

AT this moment there is a little move-
ment of neo-paganism, of sensual
naturalism and erotism at once mys-
tic and materialistic, a springtime of those
purely carnal religions where woman is
adored even for the very ugliness of her
sex, for by means of metaphors we can
idealize the imperfect and deify the illusive.
A novel of Marcel Batilliat, a young un-
known man, is, despite its serious faults,
perhaps the most curious specimen of this
erotic religiosity which zealous hearts are
cultivating as dreams or ideals. But there
is a famous manifestation, the Aphrodite of
Pierre Louys, whose success, doubtless,
henceforth will stifle as under roses, all
other claims of sexual romanticism.

It is not, although its appearance has
deceived young and old critics, a historical

183

PIERRE LOUYS

novel, such as Salamnibd or even Thais.
The perfect knowledge which Pierre Louys
possesses of Alexandrian religions and cus-
toms has allowed him to clothe his person-
ages with names and garbs veradously
ancient, but the book must be read divested
of those precautions which are not there,
just as in more than one eighteenth century
novel, where the customs, gestures and de-
sires of an incontestable today are at play
behind the embroidered screen work of
hieratic phallophores.

By the vulgarizing of art, love finally has
returned to us naked. It is in the epoch of
the flowering of Calvinism that the nude
began to be banned from manners and that
it sought refuge in art, which alone trea-
sured the tradition of it. Formerly, and
even in the time of Charles the Fifth, there
were no public celebrations without specu-
lations regarding lovely nude women; the
nude was so little dreaded that adulterous
women were driven stark naked through
the towns. It is beyond a doubt that, in
the mysteries, such roles as Adam and Eve

184

PIERRE LOUYS

were acted by persons free of fleshings, —
monstrous display. To love the nude, and
first of all femininity with its graees and in-
solences, is traditional in those races which
hard reform has not altogether terrorized.
The idea of the nude being admitted, cos-
tume can be modified to take in floating
loose robe, manners can be softened, and
something of splendor illume the gloom of
our hypocricies. By its vogue. Aphrodite
has signalled the possible return to manners
where there will be a bit of freedom; coming
from that period, this book has the value
of an antidote.

But how fallacious is such a literature.
All these women, all this flesh, the cries,
the luxury so animal, so empty and so
cruel! The females gnaw at the brains;
thought flies horror-stricken; woman's soul
oozes away as by the action of rain, and
all these copulations engender nothingness,
disgust and death.

Pierre Louys has felt that his fleshly book
logically must end in death: Aphrodite
closes in a scene of death, with obsequies.

i8s

PIERRE LOUYS

It 18 the end of Atala (Chateauhriand in-
visibly h^ers over our whole literature),
but gracefully refashioned and renewed with
art and tenderness, — so well that the idea
of death comes to join itself with the idea of
beauty; the two images, entwined like two
courtisansy slowly fades into the

x86

RACHILDE

SINCERITY, what an enormous un-
reasonable demand, if it is a question
of woman 1 Those most praised for
their candor were nevertheless comedians,
like the weeping Marceline, an actress more-
over who wept through her life, as in a role,
with the consciousness which the plaudits of
the public give. Since women have written,
not one has had the good faith to speak and
confess themselves in bold humility, and the
only ideas of feminine psychology known
to literature must be sought in the literature
of men. There is more to learn of women
in Lady Roxanna than in the complete
works of George Sand. It is not perhaps a
question of untruthfulness; it is rather a
natural incapacity to think for herself, to
take cognizance of herself in her own brain,
and not in the eyes and in the lips of others;
even when they ingenuously write into little

189

RACHILDE

secret diaries, women think of the unknown
god reading — perhaps — over their shoul-
ders. With a similar natiu'e, a woman, to
be placed in the first ranks of men, would
require even a higher genius than that of the
highest man; that is why, if the conspicuous
works of men are often superior to the men
themselves, the finest works of women are
always inferior to the worth of the women
who produced them.

This incapacity is not personal; it is
generic and absolute. It is needful, then,
to compare women exclusively with them-
selves, and not scorn them for whatever of
egoism or personality is lacking : this fault,
outside of literature and art, is generally
estimated as equal to a positive virtue.

Whether they essay their charms in per-
versity or candor, women will better succeed
in living than in playing their comedy; they
are made for life, for the flesh, for material-
ity, — and they will joyfully realize their
most romantic dreams if they do not find
themselves arrested by the indifference of
man whose more sensitive nerves suffer

190

HACHILDE

from vibrating in the void. There is an
evident contradiction between art and life;
we have hardly ever seen a man live in ac-
tion and dream at the same time, transpos-
ing in writing the gestures that first were
real: the equivalence of sensations is cer-
tain and the horrors of fear can better be
described by whosoever imagines them
than by the man that experiences them.
On the contrary, the predominance in a
temperament of tendencies to live, dulls the
sharpness of the imaginative faculties. With
the more intelligent women, those best
gifted for cerebral pursuits, the impelling
motivation will most easily be translated
into acts than into art. It is a physiological
fact, a state of nature it would be as absurd
to reproach women with as to blame men
for the smallness of their breasts or the
shortness of their hair. Moreover, if it is a
question of art, the discussion, which touches
such a small number of creatures, has for
humanity, like all purely intellectual ques-
tions, but an interest of the steeple or the
street comer.

191

RACHILDE

All this, then, being admitted, and it also
being admitted that VAnimale is Rachilde's
most singular book (although not the most
ambiguous) and that le Dimon de VAhsurde
is the best, I will willingly add, not for the
sole pleasure of contradicting myself and
destroying the virtue of the preceding pages,
that this collection of tales and imaginative
dialogue proves to me a realized effort at
true artistic sincerity. Pages like la Pan-
th^re or les Vendanges de Sodom show that a
woman can have phases of virility, to write,
careless of necessary coquetteries or cus-
tomary attitudes, make art with nothing
but an idea and from words, create.

Z9f

J. K. HUYSMANS

ROMANfiE and Chambertin, Qos-
Vougeot and Corton made the abba-
tial pomps, princely fetes, opulences
of vestments figured in gold, aglow with
light, pass before him. The Clos-Vougeot
especially dazzled him. To him that wine
seemed the syrup of great dignitaries. The
etiquette glittered before his eyes, like
glories surrounded by beams, placed in
churches, behind the occiput of Virgins."

The writer who in 1881, in the midst of
the naturalistic morass, had, before a name
read on a wine list, such a vision, although
ironic, of evoked splendors, must have
puzzled his friends and made them suspect
an approaching defection. In fact, several
years later, the unexpected A Rebours ap-
peared, and it was not a point of departure,
but the consecration of a new literature.
No longer was it so much a question of forc-

tgs

J. K. HUYSMANS

ing a brutal externality to enter the do-
mains of Art by representation, as of draw-
ing from this very representation motives
for dreams and interior revaluations. En
Rode further developed this system whose
fruitfulness is limitless, — while the natural-
istic method proved itself still more sterile
than even its enemies had dared hope, —
a system of strictest logic and of such
marvelous suppleness that it permits, with-
out forfeiting anything to likelihood, to in-
tercalate in exact scenes of rustic life, pages
like "Esther" or like the ''voyage selenien.''

The architecture of lA-Bds is based on an
analogous plan, but the license profitably
finds itself restrained by the unity of sub-
ject, which remains absolute beneath its
multiple faces: the Christ of Gunewald, in
his extreme mystic violence, his startling
and consoling hideousness, is not a fugue
without line, nor are the demoniac forest of
Tiffauges, the cruel Black Mass, or any of
the "fragments" displaced or inharmonious;
nevertheless, before the freedom of the
novel, they had been criticized, not in

196

J. K. HUYSMANS

themselves, but as not rigorously necessary
to the advance of the book. Fortunately
the novel is finally free, and to say more, the
novel, as still conceived by Zola or Bourget,
to us appears a conception as superan-
nuated as the epic poem or the tragedy.
Only, the old frame is still able to serve;
it sometimes is necessary to entice the
public to very arduous subjects, to simulate
vague romantic intrigues, which the author
unravels at his own will, after he has said
all he wished to say. But the essential of
yesterday is become the accessory, and an
accessory more and more scorned: quite
rare at the present hour are those writers
who are clever or strong enough to confine
themselves to a demolished genre, to spur
the fatigued cavalry of sentimentalities and
adulteries.

Moreover, aesthetics tends to specializa-
tion in as many forms as there are talents:
among many vanities are admissible ar-
rogances to which we cannot refuse the
right to create into normal characters.
Huysmans is of those; he no longer writes

197

• ii iiM^f-a

J. K. HUYSMANS

novels, he makes books, and he plans them
according to an origmal arrangement; I
believe that is one of the reasons why some
persons still take issue with his literature
and find it immoral. This last point is
easy to explain by a single word: for the
non-artist, art is always immoral. As soon
as one wishes, for example, to translate
sexual relations into a new language, he is
immoral because he discloses, fatally, acts
which, treated by ordinary procedures,
would remain unperceived, lost in the mist
of common things. Thus it is that an
artist, not at all erotic, can be accused of
stupid outrages by the foolish or the mis-
chievous, before the public. It, neverthe-
less, does not seem that the facts of love or
rather of aberration related in Ld-Bas at
all entice the simplicity of virginal ignor-
ance. This book rather gives disgust or
horror of sensuality in that it does not
invite to foolish experiences or even to
permissible unions. Will not immorality,
if we behold it from a particular and
peculiarly religious point of view, consist,
198

J. K. HUYSMANS

on the contrary, in the insistence upon the
exquisiteness of carnal love and the vaunt-
ing of the delights of legitimate copulation?
The Middle Age knew no^ our hjrpo-
crisies. It was not at all ignorant of the
eternal turpitudes, but it knew how to hate
them. It had no use for our conduct, nor
for our refinements; it published the vices,
sculped them on its cathedral portals and
spread them in the verses of its poets. It
had less regard for refraining from terrify-
ing the fears of mummied souls than for
tearing apart the robes and revealing the
man, and showing to man, so as to make him
ashamed, all the ugliness of his low animal-
ity. But it did not make the brute wallow
in his vice; it placed him on his knees and
made him lift his head. Huysmans has
understood all this, and it was difficult to con-
quer. After the horrors of the satanic de-
bauch, before the earthly punishment, he
has, like the noble weeping people he evokes,
forgiven even the most frightful slayers of
infants, the basest sadist, the most mon-
strous fool that ever was.

199

J. K. HUYSMANS

Having absolved such a man, he could
without Pharisaism absolve himself, and
with the aid of God, some more humble and
quite brotherly succor, of helpful reading,
visitations to gentle conventual chapels,
Huysmans one day found himself converted
to mysticism, and wrote En Route^ that book
which is like a statue of stone that sud-
denly begins to weep. It is a mysticism a
little raucous and hard, but like his phrases,
his epithets, Huysmans is hard. Mysticism
first came to him through the eyes rather
than through the soul. He observed re-
ligious facts with the fear of being their
dupe and the hope that they would be
absurd; he was caught in the very meshes
of the credo-guia-dbsurdumy — happy vic-
tim of his curiosity.

Now, fatigued at having watched men's
hypocritical faces, he watches the stones,
preparing a supreme book on 'The Cathe-
dral." There, if it is a question of feeling
and understanding, is it especially a ques-
tion of sight. He will see as no other per-
son has seen, for no one other person has

200

J. K.HUYSMANS

seen, no one ever was gifted with a glance
so sharp, so boring, so frank and so skilled
in insinuating himself into the very wrinkles
of faces, rose-windows and masks.
Huysmans is an eye.

20I

JULES LAFORGUE

N the Fleurs de bonne VolonU is a little
complaint, like th^ others, called Di-
manches:

Le del pleut sans but, sans que rien I'^meuve,
II pleut, 11 pleut, berg^re! sur le fleuve • • •

Le fleuve a son repos dominical;
Pas un chaland, en amont, en avaL

Les vftpres carillonnent sur la ville,
Les berges sont d6sertes, sans une ile.

Passe un pensionnat, 6 paiivres chairs!
Plusieurs ont d6}i. leuis manchons dliiver.

Une qui n'a ni manchon ni fourrure
Fait tout en gris une bien pauvre figure;

£t la voilit qui s'6diappe des rangs

Et court: 6 mon Dieu, qu'est-ce qui lui prend?

EUe va se jeter dans le fleuve.

Pas \m batelier, pas im chien de Terre-Neuve • • •

(TR. 46)
305

JULES LAFORGUE

And there we have, prophesized, the sud-
den absurd death, the life of Laforgue. His
heart was too cold; he departed.

His was a mind gifted with all the gifts
and rich with important acquisitions. With
his natural genius made up of sensibility,
irony, imagination and clairvoyance, he had
wished to nourish it with positive knowl-
edge, all the philosophies, all the literatures,
all the images of nature and art; and even
the latest views of science seemed to have
been familiar to him. He had an ornate
flamboyant genius, ready to construct archi-
tectural works infinitely diverse and fair, to
rear new ogives and unfamiliar domes; but
he had forgotten his winter muflE and died
one snowy day of cold.

That is why his work, already magnifi-
cent, is only the prelude of an oratorio
ended in silence.

Many of his verses are as though red-
dened by a glacial affectation of naivete;,
they speak of the too dearly cherished
child, of the young girl hearkened to — but
a sign of a true need of affection and of a

2C6

JULES. LAFORGUE

pure gentleness of heart, — adolescent of
genius who would still have wished to place
on the knees of his mother, his ' 'equatorial ^
brow, greenhouse of anomalies. " But many
have the beauty of purified topazes, the
melancholy of opals, the freshness of moon-
stones, and some pages, like that which
commences thus:

Noire bise, averse glapissante
Et fleuve noir, et miasons closes . • •

(Tft. 47)

have a sad, consoling grace, with eternal
avowals: forever on the same subject,
Laforgue retells it in such fashion that it
seems dreamed and confessed for the first
time. And I think that what we must de-
mand of the translator of dreams is, not to
wish to fix forever the fugacity of a thought
or air, but to sing the song of the present
hour with such frank force that it seems the
only one we could hear, the only one we
could understand. In the end, perhaps, it
is necessary to become reasonable and de-
light us with the present and with new
flowers, indifferent, except as a botanist, to

207

JULES LAFORGUE

the faded fields. . Every epoch of thought,
art or sentiment should take a deep delight
in itself and go down from the world with
the egoism and languor of a superb lake
which, smiling upon the old streams, re-
ceives them, calms them, and absorbs them.

There was no present for Laforgue, ex-
cept among a group of friends. He died
just as his MoraliUs Ligendaires was coming
to birth, but still offered to a minority, and
he had just learned from some mouths
that these pages consecrated him to live
the life of glory among those whom the
gods created in their image, they, too, gods
and creators. It is a literature entirely
new and disconcertingly unexpected, giving
the curious sensation (specially rare) that
we have never read anything like it; the
grape with all its velvet hues in the morning
light, but with curious reflections and an
air as if the seeds within had become frozen
by a breath of ironic wind come from some
place farther than the pole.

On a copy of r Imitation de Notre-Dame
la Lune, offered to Bourget (and since

208

JULES LAFORGUE

thrown among old papers in the quay)
Liforgue wrote: "This is only an inter-
mezw. I pray you to wait yet awhile, and
give me until my next book"; — but he was
of those who ever look forward to finding
themselves in their next work, the noble
unsatisfied who have too much to say ever
to believe that they have said other things
than prolegomenae and prefaces. If his
interrupted work is but a preface, it belongs
to those which counterbalance a finished
work.

209

JEAN MORfiAS

AYMOND DE LA TAILHfiDE
thus exalts Moreas:

Tout un silence d'or vibrant s'est abattu,
Prfcs des sources que des satyres ont troublfes,
Claire merveille 6close au profond des vallees,
Si I'oiselet chanteur du bocage s'est tu.

Oubli de flAte, heures de rftves sans alarmes,
Oii tu as su trouver pour ton sang amoureux
La douceiu: d'habiter un s6jour odoreux
De roses dont les dieux sylvains te font des armes

lA tu vas composant ces beaux livres, honneur
Du langage frangais et de la noble Ath^nes.

(TK. 48)

These verses are romances, that is, of a
poet to whom the romantic period is but a
witch's night where unreal sonorous gnomes
stir, of a poet (this one has talent) who
concentrates his efforts to imitate the

213

JEAN MORfiAS

Greeks of the Anthology through Ronsard,
and to steal from Ronsard the secret of his
laborious phrase, his botanical epithets, and
his sickly rhythm. As for what is exquisite
in Ronsard, since that little has passed into
tradition and memory, the Romantic school
had to neglect it on pain of quickly losing
what alone constitutes its originality. There
is I know not what of provincialism, of
steps against life's current, of the loiterer, in
this care for imitation and restoration.
Somewhere Moreas sings praise

De ce Sophode, honneur de la Fert£-MiIon,

(TK. 40)

and it is just that: the Romantic school
always has the air of coming from Ferte-
Milon.

But Jean Moreas, who has met his
friends on the road, started from somewhere
farther away, introduces himself more
proudly.

Arrived in Paris like any other Wallachian
or Eastern student, and already full of love
for the French language, Moreas betook
himself to the school of the old poetsr and

214

JEAN MORfiAS

frequented the society of Jacot de Forest
and Benoit de Sainte-Maure. He wished
to take the road to which every clever
youth should vow himself who is ambitious
to become a good harper; he swore to ac-
complish the complete pilgrimage: At this
hour, having set out from the Chanson de
Saint" Ligefy he has, it is said, reached the
seventeenth century, and this in less than
ten years. It is not as discouraging as one
supposes. And now that texts are more
familiar, the road shortens: from now on
less halts. Moreas will camp under the
old Hugo oak, and, if he perseveres, we shall
see him achieve the aim of his voyage,
which doubtless is to catch up with himself.
Then, casting aside the staff, often changed
and cut from such diverse copses, he will lean
on his own genius and we will be able to
judge him, if that be our whim, with a cer-
tam security.

All that today can be said is that Moreas
passionately loves the French language and
poetry, and that the two proud-hearted
sisters have smiled upon him more than

JEAN MOREAS

once» satisfied to see near their steps a pil-
grim so patient, a cavaUer armed with such
good-will.

Cavalcando I'altijer per un cammino,
Pensoso dell andar che mi sgradia,
Trovai Amor in mezzo della via
In abito legger di pellegrino.

Thus Moreas goes, quite attentive, quite
in love, and in the light robe of a pilgrim.
When he called one of his poems le Pelerin
passiontUy he gave an excellent idea and a
very sane symbolism of himself, his role and
his playings among us.

There are fine things in that Pelerin, and
also in les Syrtes; there are admirable and
delicious touches and which (for my part) I
shall always joyfully reread, in les Can-
til^neSy but inasmuch as Moreas, having
changed his manner, repudiates these primi-
tive works, I shall not insist. There re-
mains Eriphylcy a delicate collection formed
of a poem of four "sylvae", all in the taste
of the Renaissance and destined to be the
book of examples where the young "Rom-
ans", spurred on by the somewhat intem-

2X6^

JEAN MOREAS

perate invectives of Charles Maurras, must
study the classic art of composing facile
verses laboriously. Here is a page:

Astre biillant, PhA6 aux ailes 6tendues,

O flamme de la nuit qui crots et diminues,

Favorise la route et les sombres forfets

Oe mon ami errant porte ses pas discrets!

Dans la grotte au vain bruit dont I'entr^e est tout lierre,

Sur la roche pointue aux ch^vres famili^re,

Sur le lac, sur I'^tang, sur leurs tranquilles eaux,

Sur les bords £maill6s oil plaignent les roseaux,

Dans le cristal rompu des ruisselets obliques^

n aime k voir trembler tes feux m61ancoliques.

Ph£b£, 6 Cynthia, dte sa saison premi^rei
Mon ami fut 6pris de ta belle lumifere;
Dans leur cerde observant tes visages divers,
Sous ta douce influence il composait ses vers.
Par dessus Nice, Er3rx, Sesnre et la sablonneuse
lodos, le Tmolus et la grande Epidaure,
Et la verte Cydon, sa pi6t6 honore
Ce rocher de Latmos oH tu f us amoureuse.

(TR. «1)

Moreas, like his Phoebe, has tried to put
on many diverse countenances and even
to cover his face with masks. We always
recognize him from his brothers: he is a poet.

317

STUART MERRILL

STUART MERRILL,

THE logic of an amateur of literature
is offended upon his discovering that
his admirations disagree with those
of the public; but he is not surprised,
knowing that there are the elect of the last
hour. The public's attitude is less benig-
nant when it learns the disaccord which is
noticeable between it, obscure master of
glories, and the opinion of the small oli-
garchic number. Accustomed to couple
these two ideas, renown and talent, it
shows a repugnance in disjoining them; it
does not admit, for it has a secret sense of
justice or logic, that an illustrious author
might be so by chance alone, or that an
unknown author merits recognition. Here
is a misunderstanding, doubtless old as the
six thousand years ascribed by La Bruyfere
to human thought, and this misunder-

221

STUART MERRILL

standing, based on very logical and solid
reasoning, sets at defiance from the height
of its pedestal all attempts at conciliation.
To end it, it is needful to limit oneself to the
timid insinuations of science and to ask
if we truly know the "thing in itself,'* if
there is not a certain inevitable little
difference between the object of knowledge
and the knowledge of the object. . On this
ground, as one will be less understood,
agreement will be easier and then the legiti-
mate difference of opinions will be volun-
tarily admitted, since it is not a question of
captivating Truth — that reflection of a
moon in a well — but to measure by ap-
proximation, as is done with stars, the dis-
tance or the difference existing between the
genius of a poet and the idea we have of it.
Were it necessary, which is quite useless,
to express oneself more clearly, it might be
said that, according to several persons whose
opinion perhaps is worth that of many
others, all the literary history, as written
by professors according to educational views,
is but a mass of judgmoits nearly all

222

STUART MERRILL

reversed, and that, in particular, the his-
tories of French literature is but the banal
cataloguing of the plaudits and crowns
fallen to the cleverest or most fortunate.
Perhaps it is time to adopt another method
and to give, among the celebrated persons,
a place to those who could have attained it
— if the snow had not fallen on the day
they announced the glory of the new spring.

Stuart Merrill and Saint-Pol-Roux are of
those whom the snow gainsaid. If the
public knows their names less than some
others, it is not that they have less merit,
it is that they had less good fortune.

The poet of FasteSy by the mere choice
of this word, bespeaks the fair frankness of
a rich soul and a generous talent. His
verses, a little gilded, a little clamorous,
truly burst forth and peal for the holidays
and gorgeous parades, and when the play
of sunshine has passed, behold the torches
illumined in the night for the sumptuous
procession of supernatural women. Poems
or women, they doubtless are bedecked with
too many rings and rubies and their robes

223

STUART MERRILL

are embroidered with too much gold; they
are royal courtisaiis rather than princesses,
but we love their cruel eyes and russet hair.
After such splendid trumpets, the Petits
Pohnes d^ Automne, the noise of the spijming
wheel, a sound of a bell, an air of a flute in
tone of moonlight: it is the drowsiness and
dreaming saddened by the silence of things^
the incertitude of the hours:

C'cst le vent d'automiie dans Tallje^
Soeur, £coute, et la chute sur Teau
Des f euilles du saule et du bouleau,
Et c'est le givre dans la vallee,

D^ione — il est llieure — tes cheveanz
Plus blonds que le dianvre que tu files • • •

Et viens, pareiUe k ces difttelaines

Dolentes i qui tu fais song^,

Dans le silence oA meurt ton l^er

Rouet, 6 ma soeur des maijolainesl

(ft. Ml

Thus, in Stuart Merrill we discover the
contrast and struggle of a spirited tempera-
ment and a very gentle heart, and according
as one of the two natures prevails, we hear

224

' STUART MERRILL

the violence of brasses or the murmurings
of viols. Similarly does his technique oscil-
late from Gamines to his latest poems, from
the Parnassian stiffness to the verso sueUo
of the new schools, which only the senators
of art do not recognize. Vers libre, which
is favorable to original talent, and which is
a reef of danger to others, could not help
winning over so gifted a poet, and so intel-
ligent an innovator. This is how he un-
derstands it:

Venez avec des couronnes de primeveres dans vos mains,
O fillettes qui pleurez la soeur morte a I'aturore.
Les cloches de la vallee sonnent la fin d'un sort,
Et Ton voit luire des peUes au soleil du matin.

Venez avec des corbeilles de violettes, 6 fillettes
Qui h6sitez im peu dans le chemin des h^tres,
Par crainte des paroles solennelles du pr^tre.
Venez, le del est tout sonore d'invisibles alouettes. •

C'est la f6te de la mort, et Ton dindt dimanche,
Tant les cloches sonnent, douces au fond de la vall^;
Les gallons se sont caches dans les peftites all6es;
Vous seules devez prier au pied de la tombe blanche. . .

225

STUART MERRILL

Qudque ann^e, les gaiipiiis qui se cachent aujourdliui
Viendront vous dire it toutes la douce douleur d'aimer,
Et Ton vous entendra, autour du xokt de maiy
Qianter des rondes d'eofance pour saluer la nuit.

(Tku 58)

Stuart Merrill did not embark in vain, the
day he desired to cross the Atlantic, to come
and woo the proud French poetry, and
place one of her flowers in his hair.

226

SAINT-POL-ROUX

ONE of the most fruitful and astonish-
ing inventors of images and meta-
phors. To find new expressions,
Huysmans materializes the spiritual and
the intellectual spheres, thus giving his
style a precision somewhat heavy and a
lucidity rather unnatural: rotten sends (like
teeth) and cracked hearts (like an old wall) ;
it is picturesque and nothing else. The
inverse operation is more conformable to
the old taste of men for endowing vague
sentiments and a dim consciousness to
objects. It remains faithful to the pan-
theistic and animistic tradition without
which neither art nor poetry would be
possible. It is the deep source from which
all the others are formed, pure water trans-
formed by the slightest ray of sunshine into
jewels sparkling like fairy collars. Other
"metaphorists" like Jules Renard, venture

aa9

SAINT-POL-ROUX

to seek the image either in a reforming
vision, a detail separated from the whole
becoming the thing itself, or in a transposi-
tion and exoneration of metaphors in
usage; finally, there is the analogic method
by which, without our volimtary aid, the
meaning of ordinary words change daily.
Saint-Pol-Roux blends these methods and
makes them all contribute to the manu-
facture of images which, if they are all new,
are not all beautiful. From them a cata-
logue or a dictionary could be drawn up:

Wise- Woman of light — the cock.

Monx>w of the caterpillar in balldress — butterfly.

Sin that sucks — natural child.

Living distaff — mutton.

Fin of the plow — plowshare.

Wasp with the whip sting — diligence.

Breast of crystal — flagon.

Crab of the hand — open hand.

Letter announcement — magpie.

Cemetery with wings — a flight of crows.

Romance for the nostrils — perfume of flowers.

To tame the carious jawbone of bemol of a modem

tarask — to play the piano.
Surly gewgaw of the doorway — watchdog.
230

SAINT-POL-ROUX

Bla^heming Umotisine — wagoner.

To chant a bronze alexandrine — to peal midnight

Cognac of Father Adam — the broad, pure air.

Imagery only seen with dosed eyes — dreams.

Leaves of living salad — frogs.

Green chatterers — frogs.

Sonorous wild-poppy — cock-crow.

The most heedless person, having read
this last, will decide that Saint-Pol-Roux is
gifted with an imagination and with an
equally exuberant wretched taste. If all
these images, some of which are ingenious,
followed one after another towards les
Reposoirs de la Procession where the poet
guides them, the reading of such a work
would be difficult and the smile would often
temper the aesthetic emotion; but strewn
here and there, they but form stains and
do not always break the harmony of richly
colored, ingenious and grave poems. Le
PUerinage de Sainte-Anney written almost
entirely in images, is free of all impurity and
the metaphors, as Theophile Gautier would
have wished, unfold themselves in profusion,
but logically and knit together: it is the

231

SAINT-POL-ROUX

type and marvel of the prose poem, with
rhythm and assonance. In the same vol-
ume, the Nocturne dedicated to Huysmans
is but a vain chaplet of incoherent cata-
chreses: the ideas there are devoured by a
frightful troop of beasts. But VAutopsie
de la Vieillefilley despite a fault of tone, but
Calvaire imnUmorialy but VAme saisissable
are masterpieces. Saint-Pol-Roux plays on
a zither whose strings sometimes are too
tightly drawn: a turn of the key would
suffice for our ears ever to be deeply glad-
dened.

23»

ROBERT DE MONTESQUIOU

UPON the first appearance of his
Chauves-Souris in violet velvet, the
question was seriously put whether
de Montesquiou was a poet or an amateur
of poetry, and whether the fashionable
world could be harmonized with the cult
of the Nine Sisters, or of any one of them,
for nine women are a lot. But to discourse
in such fashion is to confess one's un-
familiarity with that logical operation called
the dissociation of ideas, for it seems ele-
mentary logic separately to evaluate the
worth or beauty of the tree and its fruit, of
man and his works. Whether jewel or
pebble, the book will be judged in itself,
disr^arding the source, the quarry or the
stream from which it comes, and the dia-
mond will not change its name, whether
hailing from the Cape or from Golconda.
To criticism the social life of a poet matters

235

ROBERT DE MONTESQUIOU

as little as to Polymnia herself, who in-
difFerently welcomes into her circle the
peasant Bums and the partician Byron,
Villon the purse-snatcher and Frederick II,
the king: Art's book of heraldry and that
of Hozier are not written in the same style.

So we will not disturb ourselves with un-
raveling the flax from the distaff, or as-
certaining what of illusiveness de Montes-
quiou and his status of a man of fashion
have been able to add to the renown of the
poet.

The poet, here, is "a precieuse".

Were those women really so ridiculous,
who, to place themselves in the tone of
some fine and gallant poets, imagined new
ways of speech, and, through a hatred of
the common, affected a singularity of mind,
costume and gesture? Their crime, after
all, was in not wishing to conform with the
world, and it seems that they paid dearly for
this, they — and the entire French poetry
which, for a century and a half, truly feared
ridicule too much. Poets at last are freed
from such horrors; in fact they are now

236

ROBERT DE MONTESQUIOU

allowed to avow their originality; far from
forbidding them to go naked, criticism
encourages them to assunie the free easy
dress of the gymnosophist. But some of
them are tattooed.

And that is really the true quarrel with
de Montesquiou: his originality is exces-
sively tattooed. Its beauty recalls, not
without melancholy, the complicated figura-
tions with which the old Australian chieftains
were wont to ornament themselves; there is
even an odd refinement in the nuances, the
design, and the amusing audacities of tone
and lines. He achieves the arabesque better
than the figure, and sensation better than
thought. If he thinks, it is through ideo-
graphic signs, like the Japanese:

Poisson, gnie, aigle, fleur, bambou qu'un dseau pkne,
Tcvtue, iris, pivoine, anemone et moineaux.

(Tit. M)

He loves these juxtapositions of words,
and when he chooses them, like those above,
soft and vivid, the landscape he seeks is
quite pleasantly evoked^ but often one sees,

«37

ROBERT DE MONTESQUIOU

relieved against an artificial sky, hard un-
familiar forms, processions of carnival lar-
vae. Or rather, women, girls, birds, —
baubles deformed by a too Oriental fancy;
baubles and trinkets:

Je voudrais que ce vers fftt un bibelot d'art,

criL S5)

is the aesthetics of de Montesquiou, but the
bauble is no more than an amusing fragile
thing to be placed under a glass case or
closet, — yes, preferably in a closet. Then,
disburdened of all this grotto work, all this
lacquer, all this delicate paste, and as he
himself wittily says, all these ''shelves of
infusoria," the poet's museum would be-
come an agreeable gallery, where one would
pleasantly muse before the many metamor-
phoses of a soul anxious to give a new
nuance-laden grace to beauty. With the
half of the Hortensias bleus one could make
a book, still quite thick, which would be
almost entirely composed of fine or proud
or delicate poetry. The author of AnciUa,
of Mortuis ignotisy and of Tables vives
238

ROBERT DE MONTESQUIOU

would appear what he truly is, excluding all
travesty, — a good poet.

Here is a part of the Tables vives^ whose
title is obscure, but whose verses have
beautiful clarity, despite the too familiar
sound of some too Parnassian rimes and
some verbal incertitudes:

• • • Apprenez i, I'enfant k prier les flots bleus,
Car c'est le del d'en bas dont la nue est r6cume,
Le reflet du soleil qui sur la mer s'allume
Est plus/ioux k fixer pour nos yeux n^buleuz.

Apprenez k I'enfant k prier le del pur,
C'est roc6an d'en haut dont la vague est nuage.
L'ombre d'une temp^te abondante en naufrage
Pourjnos coeiu:s est moins triste a suivre dans I'azur.

Apprenez k I'enfant k prier toutes choses:
L'abeille de I'esprit compose un mid de jour
Sur les vivants ave du rosaire des roses,
Chapelet de parfums aux dizaines d'amotu* . • •

In short, de Montesquiou exists: blue
hortensia, green rose or white peony, he is
of those flowers one curiously gazes upon in
a bed of flowers, whose name one asks and
whose memory one cherishes.

239

GUSTAVE KAHN

DOMAINE DE FfiE,aSong of Songs
recited by one lone voice, very
charming and very amorous, in a
Verlainian setting, — O eternal Verlaine !

O bd avril ^paooui,

Qu'importe ta chanson franche,

Tes lilas blancs, tes aub6pines et Tor fleuri

De ton 9(deil par les branches,

Si loin de moi la bien-aim£e

Dans les brumes du nord est rest6e.

mt. 67)

That is the tone. It is very simple, very
delicate, very pure and sometimes biblical:

J'^tais aM jusu'au fond du jardin,
Quand dans la nuit une invisible main
Me terrassa plus forte que moi —
Une voix me dit: C'est pour ta joie.

Dilectus meus descendU in hortum . . . but
here the poet, as chaste, is less sensual : The
Orient has thrown a surplice over an Occi-

243

GUSTAVE KAHN

dental soul, and if he still cultivates large
white lilies in his enclosed garden, he has
learned the pleasure of escaping, by secret
paths known to fairies, ''in the forest noise-
lessly laughing", as they gather bindweed,
broom,
Et les fleurettes aventuiibts le long des haies.

This poem of twenty-four leaves is doubt-
less the most delicious little book of love
verses given us since the Fetes GcUanteSy and
with the Chansons d'amant are perhaps the
only verses of these last years where senti-
ment dare confess in utter frankness, with'
the perfect and touching grace of divine
sincerity. If, in some of these pages, there
still remains a touch of rhetoric, it is because
Kahn, even at the feet of the Sulamite, has
not renounced the pleasure of surprising by
the ever novel deftness of the jongleur and
virtuoso, and if he sometimes treats the
French language tyrannically, it is that for
him she has always had the affectionate
yieldings of a slave. He abuses his power
a little, giving some words meanings that

344

GUSTAVE KAHN

hang on the skirts of others^ making phrases
yield to a too summary syntax, but these
are mischievous habits not exclusively per-
sonal to him. His science of rhythm and
mastery in wielding free verse, he borrows
from no one.

Was Kahn the first ? To whom do we owe
free verse? To Rimbaud, whose lUutnina'
tions appeared in Vogue in 1886, to Lafor-
gue, who at the same period, in the same
precious little review, — conducted by Kahn

— published Ligende and Solo de lune^ and,
finally, to Kahn himself; at that time he
wrote:

Void I'all^presse des &mes d'automne,

La Ville s'6viq)ore en illusions proches,

Void se voiler de violet et d'orang6 les pordies

De la nuit sans lune

Princesse, qu'as tu fait de ta tiare orf^vrfe?

CTft. 60)

— and particularly to Walt Whitman,
whose majestic license was then beginning
to be appreciated.

How joyfully this tiny Vogue^ which to-
day sells at the price of miniature parch-
ments, was read imder the galleries of the

GUSTAVE KAHN

Odeon by timid youths drunk with the odor
of novelty which these pale little pages
exhaled.

Kahn's last collection, la Pluie et le Beau
temps, has not changed our opinion of his
talent and originality: he remains equal to
himself with his two tendencies, here less in
harmony, towards sentiment and the pic-
turesque, quite apparent if one compares
with Image, that so mournful hynm,

O J£sus couroim£ de ronces,

Qui saigne en tous coeurs meurtiis,

(TlLM>

the Dialogue de Z&anae,

Bonjour mynher, bonjour myffrau,

as pretty and sweet as some old almanac
print. Here, in the middle tone, is a truly
faultless lied:

Uheure du nuage blanc s'est fondue sur la phune
En reflets de sang, en flocons de laine,
O bniyires roses, 6 del couleur de sang.

Llieure du nuage d'or a pftli sur la plaine,

Et tombent des voiles lents et longs de blanche laine

O bruyires mauves — 6 del couleur de sang.

246

GUSTAVE KAHN

Llieure du nuage d'or a crev6 stir la plainei

Les roseaux chantaient doux sous le vent de liame»

O bruyferes rouges — 6 del couleur de sang.

Llieure du nuage d'or a pass6 sur la plaine
Ephdm^ment: sa splendeur est lointaine,
O bruyire d'or — 6 del couleur de sang.

(TK.63)

Words, words! Doubtless, but well se-
lected and artistically blended. Kahn is
before everything else an artist: sometimes
he is more.

247

PAUL VERLAINE

*■>

PAUL VERLAINE

GASTON BOISSIER, in crowning
(touching custom 1) a fifty-year-old
poet, congratulated him for never
having innovated, for having expressed
ordinary ideas in a facile style, for having
scrupulously conformed to the traditional
laws of French poetics.

Might not a history of our literature be
written by n^lecting the innovators? Ron-
sard would be replaced by Ponthus de
Thyard, Comeille by his brother, Racine
by Campistron, Lamartine by de Laprade,
Victor Hugo by Ponsard, and Verlaine by
Aicard; it would be more encouraging, more
academic and perhaps more fashionable, for
genius in France always seems slightly
ridiculous.

Verlaine is a nature and as such unde-
fixiable. Like his life, the rhythms he loves
are of broken or rolling lines; he ended by
disjoining romantic verse, and having de-

2Sl

/■

PAUL VERLAINE

stroyed its form, having bored and ripped it
so as to permit too many things to be in-
troduced, all the effervescences that issued
from his crazy skull, he imwittingly became
one of the instigators of vers libre. Ver-
lainian verse with its shoots, its incidences,
its parentheses, naturally evolved into vers
libre; in becoming "libre," it did no more
than reflect a condition.

When the gift of expression forsakes him,
and when at the same time the gift of tears
is removed, he either becomes the blustering
rough iambic writer of Invectives, or the
humble awkward elegist of Chansons pour
EUe. Poet by these very gifts, consecrated
to talk felicitously only of love, all loves;
and he whose lips press as in a dream upon
the stars of the purifactory robe, he who
wrote the Amies composed those Canticles
of the month of Mary. And from the same
heart, the same hand, the same genius, —
but who shall chant them, O hypocrites 1
if not those very white-veiled Friends.

To confess one's sins of action or dreams
is not sinful; no public confession can bring
25a

PAUL VERLAINE

disrepute to a man, for all men are equal and
equally tempted; no one commits a crime
his brother is not capable of. That is why
the pious journals or the Academy vainly
took upon themselves the shame of having
abused Verlaine, still under the flowers;
the kick of the sacristan and scoundrel
broke on a pedestal already of granite, while
in his marble beard, Verlaine was everlast-
ingly smiling, with the look of a faun heark-
ening while the bells peal.

aS3

TRANSLATIONS FROM TEE TEXT

Mtgnificent, bat who without hopes ddhren himself for not
having praised the country in which to live when ennui has
grown resplendent out of the sterile winter.

Cnt.2)

Wb nedk win shake off this white agony.

(Ta. 3)

As if he were fashioning the steel of souls, hammers with great
full strokes, the immense plates of patience and silence.

CnL4)

The savage wind of November, the wind, have you met it, the
wind at the crossroads of three hundred paths. • • ?

CHl 8)

Seated gigantically on the side of the night.

(Tr. 0)

these crowds, these crowds, and the misery and distress that
whips them like billows.

Monstrances, decorated with silk, towards the heaped up towns,
in roofs of glass and cr3rstal, from the height of the sacerdotal
choir, stretch the cross of gothic ideas.

They obtrude themselves in the gold of clear Sundays — All
Saints' day, Christmas, Easter, and white Pentecosts. They
obtrude themselves in the gold and in the incense and in the fete
of the great organ beating with the flight of its storms.

The red capitals and vermillion vaults are a soul, in sun-
light, living in the old background and antique authoritarian
mystery.

254

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE TEXT

Yet, when the song and the naive, prismatic anthem ceases, a
grief of incense evaporated stamps itself on the golden tripods
and brazen altars.

And the stained glass windows, lofty with ages kneeling before
Christ, with their immobile popes and mart}^^ and heroes, seem
to tremble at the sound of a proud train passing through the town.

CHl 7)

Formerly — there was the errant, somnambulous life, across the
mornings and fabulous evening, when the right hand of God
towards the blue Canaans traced the golden road in the depth
of the shadows.

Formerly — there was the enormous, exasperated life, fiercely
hung on themaiues of stallions, suddenly, with great sparks from
their hoofs, and towards immense space inmiensely provoked.

Formerly — ^there was the ardent, evocative life; the white Cross
of heaven, the red Crss of hell advanced, to the splendor of iron
armors, each across blood, towards his victorious heaven.

Formerly — there was the foaming livid life, alive and dead, with
strokes of crime and tocsins, battle between them, of proscribers
and assassins, wfth splendid and mad death above them.

CTk. 8)

The melancholy time has ornamented its hours like dead
flowers; the passing year has yellowed its days like dry leaves.
The pale dawn is seen by gloomy waters and the faces of evening
have bled under the arrows of the laughing, bleeding, mysterious
wind.

(Ta.9)

I know sad waters in which die the evenings; flowers which
nobody gathers fall there one by one.

(Tr. 10)

Yesterday the dawn was so pale over the peaceful meadows and
shavegrass; in the clear morning came a child to gather plants,
leaning on them his pure hands that gathered the asphodels.

Noon was heavy with storm and dismal with sunlight in the

255

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE TEXT

garden dead of pride in its lethargic sleep of flowers and trees;

the water was hard to the eye like marble, the marble warm and

dear like water, and the child that came was comely, clad in

purple and golden-hair, and long one saw the peonies, one by

one, draw their blood from the petals at the passage of the fair

child.

The child that came that evening was naked. He gathered roses

in the dusk, he sobbed at having come, he retreated before his

shadow. It is like him, naked, that my destiny has recognized

itadf.

(Tr. 11)

Goat's leaf grofws under my May forest. The sun drops in gold
throui^ the heavy gloom. A roe-buck stirs in the leaves he
gathers. The breeze in the frieze of birches passes from leaf to
leaf.

The grasses are silvered in my May fidd. There the sim gleams
like a play of swords. A bee vibrates to the lilies of the valley
in the lane of tall grouped flowers, towards the bed of the stream.
The breeze sings in the frieze of the ash-trees.

CTK. 12)

Where is the Marguerite, O gu6, o gu6, where is the Marguerite?
She is in her chateau, weary and tired at heart. She is in her ham-
let, gay and childish at heart She is in her grave, let us gather
there the lily-of-the-valley, O gu6, the Marguerite.

(Tr. 13)

Where are our bdoved ones? They are in the grave; they are
happier in a fairer sojourn.

CTr. 14)

Of what use is beauty? Its use is to go in earth, to be eaten
by worms, to be eaten by worms ...

(Tr. 16)

Do you not fed in you the opulence of being only for yourself
beautiful, O Sea, and of being yourself?

256

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE TEXT

(Ju. 17)

Nature is a temple where living pUlars sometimes let confused
words issue; man passes there through forests of symbols wsttch-
ing him with friendly gaze.

Like long echoes blended in distance to deep, dim unity, vast as
night and clear as day, the perfumes, colors and sounds answer
each other.

(Ttu 19)

The flesh is sad, alas! and I have read all the books.

To fly yonder! I feel that the birds are drunk

At being among the unknown foam and the heavens

An autumn strewn with stains of redness . . •
And you were the sobbing whitness of lilies . . •
I bring you the child of an Idumean night . • •
His neck will shake off this white agony

• • •

• »

(Tr. 19)
Tlie dream, in a heliotrope robe, and her thought on her
fingers,

with loosened girdle, passes, lightly grazing souls with her cloud
train, to the extinct rhythm of a music of other times.

(Tr. 20)
In the lingering fragrance of an evening of the last days.

(Tb. 21)

The roses of the west shed their leaves on the stream; and, in
the pale emotion of the falling evening, is evoked an autumnal
park where, on a bench, dreams my youth, already sober as a
widow.

(Tr. 22)

Chastely you walked in the robe of your soul, which desire
followed like a tamed faun; I breathed through the evening, O
purity, my dream enveloped in your womanly vails.

2S7

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE TEXT

(TR. 23)

Fair verses where the fluid sense is loosened like the hair of
Ophelia under the water. Silent verses, without rhythm or
^ammds, where noiselessly the rhyme slips like an oar. Verses
of an old thin stuff, impalpable as sound or doud. Verses of
autumnal evenings bewitching the hours with the feminine rite
of minor S3^bles. Verses of evenings of loves enervated with
verbena, where, exquisitely, the soul hardly feels a caress.

CTr. 24)
Id the Vendor of violet moonlights.

(TR. 25)

Hien from the depths and holy night, as a young sun springs
from abysms of the sea, white, letting stream from shoulders to
back her hair where pale hyacinths swim, a woman rises.

(Tr. 26)

If you dasp only chimerae, if you drink the intoxication of
delusive wine, what matter! The sun dies, the imaginary crowd
is dead, but the world subsists in your own soul: See! the days
are faded like brief roses, but your word has created the mirage
in which you live.

(Tr. 27)
I have known all the gods of earth and heavea.

(Tr. 28)
Eternal flowers, flowers equal to the gods I

(Tr. 29)
The fur, the white, the lovely Udy of lilies.

(TR. 80)

The autumn roses wither, the flowers that bedecked the graves;
slowly the coroUae are scattered and the cold ground is strewn
with falling petals.

2SS

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE TEXT

(JU. 31)

There are houses whose fronts weep, there are knells that toll
in the belf ly, where faint bells ring. Towards what streams of
death have the virgins marched, the virgins with fair rings on
thdifingen?

(TR. 32)

Lady of amouzous, swooning lilies^
Lady of languishing, faded lilies.
Sad with eyes of belladonna.

Lady of dreams of royal roses.
Lady of sombre, nuptial roses.
Frail as a madonna —

Lady of heaven and rapture,
Lady of ecstacy and renouncement,
CSiaste far-off star.

Lady of hell, thy sullen smile.
Lady of the devil, a kiss of thy mouthf
Is the fire of evil fountains.
And J bum if I touch thee.

CTr. 33)
Methinks, my soul, thou art a garden.

CTR. 34)

Of the ]Mdy that has passed away.

(Tr. 35)

HELEN
(Fausfs laboratory at WUUnberg)
From the evolved ages I have reascended the stream and, with
a heart intoxicated by sublime designs, deserted the Hades and
holy shades where the soul is steeped in an ineffable calm.

Time has not bent the curve of my breasts. I am ever up and
strong in trial, I, the eternal virgin and eternal widow, glory of
Hellas, among war with its black tocsins.

259

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE TEXT

Faust 1 I come to you, abandoning the bosom of the Mothers.'
For you I have left, on wings of the chimerae, the pale shades
where he buried the gods.

1 bring for your love, from the depths of antique skies, my neck
whose lilies time has not vanquished and my voice made supple
with prophetic riiythms.

(TIL 86)

Bourget, Maupassant and Loti are found in al! the statKuis,
offered with the roast. Choose these authors at the same time
as the cigars. Bourget, Maupassant are found in all the stations.

(Ttu 37)
She is the victim and the little spouie.

. (Tr. 3S)

Truly, Monsieur Benoist approves of persons who have read
Voltaire and are opposed to Jesuits. He muses. He is partial
to long controversies, calmuniates priest and theriac.

He even was an orator at a Scotch lodge. Nevertheless —
because his lawful child believes in God — his little daughter,
in white veils and blue ribbon, received the sacrament. This
required that several liters at sixteen sous be drunk at the bistro,
among the filthy benches, where the billiard man was sleeping,
the waiters sprawling, and where his little maid in floss-silk
gloves was blushing.

Now, Benoist who colors at the sight of a churchman, shows
some pleasure at having seen, that morning, the marriage of
the only son and his young girl.

(Tr. 39)
The proud indolence of nights, perfumes and breasts.

(Tr. 40)
On Heaven's balconies in antiquated robes.
260

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE TEXT

(Tr. 41)

NOCTURNAL PARIS

It is the sea; — calm sheet. And the great tide with distant
rumbling has receded. . . The wave returns, wallowing in its
noise. Hearest thou the clawing of the night crabs.

It is the drained St3rx: Diogenes, lantern in hand, uncer-
emoniously arrives. Perverse poets angle along the black stream:
their hollow skulls serve as boxes for worms.

It is the field: to glean impure lint falls the whirling flight of
hideous harpies; the gutter rabbit, on the watch for rodents,
flees the sons of Bondy, nocturnal vintagers.

It is death: the policeman lies dead. On high, love takes a
siesta, sucking the meat with heavy hand where the eistinguished
kisses leave a red patch. Alone is the hour. Listen. Not a
dream stirs.

It is life: listen, the lively spring sings the eternal song on
the head of a sea-god drawing green naked limbs on the bed of
the Morgue . . . and the great open eyes.

DIURNAL PARIS

See gleaming in the skies the great disk of red copper, inmiense
casserole where the good God cooks manna, the harlequin,
eternal plai dujour. It is dipped in sweat and dipped in love.

The laridons wait in a circle near the oven; vaguly one hears
the rustling of rancid flesh, and the tipplers, too, are there,
holding out their jugs; the wretches shiver, waiting their turn.

Thinkest thou the sun then fries for everybody these fat
stirring scraps of burnt meat which a flood of gold inundates?
No, the dog-soup falls on us from the sky.

They are beneath the ray and we beneath the gutter. To us
the black jug that grows cold without Hght. Our substance for
ourselves is our bag of gall.

(Tr. 42)
With the assent of the tall sunflowers.

261

TRANSLAnONS FROM THE TEXT

CTk. 43)
And since, then, I have bathed me in the poem of the sea,
steeped in stars and latescent, mastering the green azure where,
flotation pale and ravished, a pensive drowned person sometimes
descends; where, suddenly staining the nuances of blue, frenzied
and slow rhythms beneath the glinting red of day, stronger than
alcohol, vaster thaa your lyres, the bitter redness of love ferments.

(Tft. 44)

Who knows if genius is not one of your virtues.

(Ta. 4^

The sky rsins without ending,''though nothing agitates it; it
rains, it rains, shepherdess! on the stream . . .

The stream has its dominical repose; not a barge up stream,
downstream.

Vespers chime in the town; the banks are deserted, not an isle.

Pssses a boarding-school group, o poor flesh 1 Several already
have on their winter mu&.

One that has neither muff nor fur makes a quite sorry figure
all in gray.

And seel She breaks from the ranks and runs; O God, what
has seized her?

She goes and throws herself in the stream. Not a boatman,
not a Newfoundland dog . . .

(Ta. 47)

Dismal north wind, screaming downpour and dark stream, and

shut houses . . .

(Ta. 49

A full silence of vibrant gold has descended near the springs
iHiich sat3rrs have troubled; a dear marvel enclosed in the heart
of the valleys, if the little singing bird remains silent.

Oblivion of the flute, hours of fearless dreams, where thou
hast known how to find for thy amorous blood the peacefulness
of inhabiting a place odorous with roses, whose sylvan gods make
thee arms.

26a

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE TEXT

There thou goest, composing beautiful books, a credit to the
French language and the noble Athens.

(Tft. 49)

Of that Sophocles, credit to Fert6-Milon.

(Tr. 60)
Once while riding on a journey,
Pensive along the route that displeased me,
I found love in the middle of the road
In a vagrant's scant attire.

(Ta. 51)
Brilliant star, Phoebe with outspread wings, flame of night
that grows and wanes, favor my way through the gloomy forest
where my errant soul takes its modest steps! In the grotto
with hollow sounds, whose entrance is ivy-covered, on the rock
topped with the familiar she-goat, on the lake, on the pond, on
the tranquil waters, on the enamelled banks where reeds moan,
she likes to see the trembling of thy melancholy fires.

Phoebe, O Cynthia, from the first season my soul was drunk
with thy lovely light; observing thy diverse faces in their orb,
beneath thy gentle influence, she composed verses. Above
Nidas, Eryz, Sins and the sandy lolchos, Timolus and the
giand £pid<»rus, and Green Sidon, her piety reveres this xock
of Latmos where thou loved.

(TiLfi3)
It is the autumn wind in the lane, sister, hearken, and the UlU
oi willow and beach tree leaves on the water, and the hoar-frost
in the valley.

And come, like those drooping great ladies, to him who is think-
ing of thee, in the silence when thy light spinning-wheel dies, O
sister of the sweet marjoram.
Loose — 'tis the hour — thy hair fairer than the hemp thou

spinnest . • •

(Tr. 63)

Come with wreathes of primroses in thy hands, O young girls,

263

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE TEXT

who mourh the sister dead at dawn. Bells of the valley peal the
end of a destiny, and spades are seen gleaming in the morning sun.

Come with baskets of violets, O young girls who slightly hesi-
tate in the path of beeches, for fear of the priest's solemn words.
Come, the sky is quite sonorous with invisible larks . . .

lis the festival of the dead, one would say Sunday, the bells
ring so gently in the heart of the valley; boys have hidden in the
lanes. Thou alone goest to pray at the foot of the white grave.

Some year, the bo3rs, who today are hidden, will come to tell
you the sweet pain of loving, and they will hear you all, around
the maypole, sing songs of childhood to greet the night.

CTr. 64)
Fish, crane, eagle, flower, bird-bent bamboo.
Turtle, iris, peony, anemone, sparrows.

CTR. 65)
I wish that this verse were a bauble of art,

Cnt. 66)

Learn from the child to pray to the blue waves, for 'tis the
sky here below whose cloud is foam. The sun's reflection spark-
ling on the sea is sweeter to gaze on to our gloomy eyes.

Learn fsom the child to pray to the pure sky, 'tis the ocean
above, whose void is cloud. The gloom of a cloud rich in wrecks
to our hearts is less sad to follow in the azure.

Learn from the child to pray to all things: the bee of the sipuit
makes a honey of Hght on the living (wts of the rosaiy of xoses,
a chaplet of perfumes on the rosaries of love.

(Tr. 67)

O lovely April, glad and bright,

What matters your blithe song.

White lilacs, hawthorns, and the flowered gold

Of sunlight streaming through the branches.

If far-away my well-beloved

In the northern fogs stays.

264

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